by Dario Castillejos, Cagle Cartoons, Dario La Crisis
Mary (the "virgin" one, allegedly) Higgsmas, Bosons!
Monday 19 December 2011
Thursday 1 December 2011
Monday 28 November 2011
The Age of Ghost-Modernism revisited...
de Mihnea Dimitrie Calin, 23 Septembrie 2011, AcademicLink.ro
Conceptul de ”hiperrealitate” este unul ce apare din ce în ce mai des în orice structură interpretativă sociologică sau filosofică cu privire la secolul XXI.
Lyotard sau Derrida vorbesc despre postmodernism ca despre “apogeul hiperrealităţii”, iar la Jean Baudrillard cu greu întâlnim pagină de text în care termenul să nu fie invocat cel puţin o dată. Teoreticienii modernităţii socio-culturale se revendică aşadar de la termenul în cauză şi exprimă prin el esenţa unor manifestări general umane care au luat amploare odată cu descompunerea credinţelor transcendentale, a se citi prăbuşirea bisericii şi scăderea forţei de influenţă a religiilor asupra desfăşurării vieţii.
Pentru a ne apleca asupra hiperrealităţii trebuie să înţelegem mai întâi anularea obiectivismului din cadrul pretenţiilor de sens din ştiinţă şi artă, uneori până la dispariţia totală a termenului. În mod originar, omul percepea adevărul ca pe un element unic, nefalsificabil, descriind judecata cu privire la o stare de fapt.
Modernitatea nu este însă nicidecum construită deasupra logicii aristotelice, căci omul modern aduce cu sine o pretenţie de sens nouă, ce ar fi fost repudiată ca blasfemie sau nonsens de către religia, respectiv fizica clasică – conjugarea lumii pornind de la interpretarea axiologică. În alţi termeni, realitatea “obiectivă” invocată de clasici este înlocuită de o realitate profund subiectivă, descriptibilă în funcţie de structurile biologice ale omului şi de valorile acestuia. Omul nu mai “are acces la realitate”, ci aduce cu sine realitatea, o întemeiază în funcţie de propriile nevoi şi interese, deci în funcţie de propriile pretenţii de sens.
În ştiinţele umane, această trecere este esenţială şi duce la deplasarea interesului dinspre structurile lumii înspre structurile fiinţei individuale, a modului în care omul este alcătuit, evoluează şi se manifestă. În sociologie, această deplasare este sinonimă cu înlocuirea realităţii prin hiperrealitate.
Timp de secole, lumea a fost văzută ca produs divin, realizat dintr-o dată şi cu evoluţie planificată dintr-o dată. În postmodernism, ea este văzută ca o colecţie de interpretări divergente, fiecare producând grade de realitate în măsura în care au impact la nivelul interacţiunilor umane. Însă consecinţele acestei mutaţii sunt mai numeroase decât s-ar fi anticipat în mod originar. Dacă adevărul reprezintă nimic mai mult decât o pretenţie discursivă, sau un dat recuperabil la capătul unui proces de alterare a realităţii prin intervenţie umană, atunci lumea noastră mentală se alcătuieşte în moduri multiple. Hiperrealitatea este nimic altceva decât varianta de piaţă, desacralizată, multiplicabilă şi gestionabilă a variantei originale a termenului. Prin hiperrealitate, accentul se deplasează dinspre ceea ce este înspre ceea ce poate fi utilizat, dinspre adevăr înspre copiile sale, dinspre existenţă înspre transmisie şi manipulare prin transmisie. Prin intermediul mass-media, omul îşi construieşte o nouă citadelă informativă, prin intermediul căreia poate manevra “realul” după bunul plac – prin scoatere din context, prin manipulare imaginală, prin omisiune, prin exagerare a importanţei sau prin conexiuni aleatorii. Întrucât nimic nu mai posedă adevăr “în sine”, nimic nu mai posedă nici valoare “în sine”, prin urmare totul este permis, iar rezultatul este o realitate “călduţă”, construită pentru a corespunde celei mai mari nevoi umane – cea de protecţie.
Publicitatea reprezintă la rândul ei o mare parte din hiperrealitate. Scopul său, dincolo de un simplu act de eficientizare a comercializării unui produs, este reafirmarea unei valori generale în jurul căreia fiinţa umană să se alcătuiască. Până în momentul revoluţiei industriale şi a iluminismului, aceasta era atingerea Vieţii de Apoi, deci obţinerea mântuirii în urma unei vieţi virtuoase. Odată ce această pretenţie de sens a fost suspendată, omul a început să se deplaseze haotic printre ruinele vechii lumi, în căutarea unui nou sens al vieţii, a unei noi definiţii a fericirii. Dinspre publicitate, acest sens este acumularea de produse. “Mai multe produse = mai multe nevoi satisfăcute = fericire” este schema minimalistă pe care societatea de consum o propune în locul revoluţiei prin credinţă. Cât despre eficienţa sa, aceasta este incontestabilă în măsura în care mallul ajunge, chiar în ţările subdezvoltate economic, să domine peisajul urban al secolului XXI. Trăim aşadar într-o hiperrealitate cu profil comercial, în care nevoile umane sunt create prin promovare de imagini, pentru a fi ulterior satisfăcute prin promovare de produse – un circuit închis care abandonează fiinţa umană în mâinile speculanţilor, profitând de slăbiciunile sale naturale.
Alternativa la această facilă fericire de împrumut, lipsită de orice profunzime, este depresia în faţa unei lumi aflată în criză de identitate şi care şi-a pierdut idealurile ce o ţineau împreună. De aceea, postmodernismul este considerat a fi epoca fericirii uşoare şi a depresiei profunde, depinzând de lejeritatea îmbrăţişarii soluţiilor externe la propriile probleme şi de disponibilitatea realizării de compromisuri.
Ce ne va aduce viitorul? Conform lui Jean Baudrillard, o dizolvare ultimă a diferenţelor dintre indivizi în favoarea îmbrăţişării generale a unui trai comun în care reactivitatea să fie trăsătura dominantă. Conform lui Nietzsche, o lume în care oamenii, lipsiţi de identitate, se vor considera inventatorii fericirii. Conform lui Warren Buffet, un triumf al economicului împotriva economicului, şi al societăţii de consum împotriva societăţii de consum, rezultând într-o implozie cu consecinţe inimaginabile. Oricare ar fi cazul, hiperrealitatea rămâne unul dintre pilonii lumii moderne, prin urmare se cuvine a nu uita că “adevărul” care ne este prezentat în cadrul unor situaţii reprezintă un produs uman şi nimic mai mult, având la limită aceeaşi valoare ca un bax de Coca-Cola sau poate o excursie la Disneyland.
Saturday 19 November 2011
Occupy the Bankrupt Capitalist Paradigm
BBC © 2011 Europe is struggling to find a way out of the eurozone crisis amid mounting debts, stalling growth and widespread market jitters. After Greece, Ireland, and Portugal were forced to seek bail-outs, Italy - approaching an unaffordable cost of borrowing - has been the latest focus of concern.
While lending between nations presents little problem during boom years, when a country can no longer handle its debts, those overseas banks and financial institutions that lent it money are exposed to losses. This could not only unsettle the home country of those banks, but could, in turn, spread the troubles across the world.
So, in the tangled web of inter-country lending, who owes what to whom? Click on a country in the circle to find out what they owe to banks in other countries, as well to find out their total foreign debt, including that owed by governments, monetary authorities, banks and companies.
Thursday 17 November 2011
The (Hyper-)Reality of the "Celebrity" Money-Printing Machine
original Beeb article revisited here as a morcel of food-4-thought that might just trigger a mass indigestion with the corporate infotainment industry...
"I wanna go up, I wanna be a star, I wanna have boobies..."
The reality of the celebrity money machine
How did US celebrity Kim Kardashian and her family make $65m (£41m) last year, when they can't act, play an instrument, sing, dance, or throw a ball?
While they have none of the talents that traditionally lead to fame and fortune, celebrities like Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Spencer Pratt, and the cast of The Jersey Shore make money from sponsorship deals for everything they do.
Author Jo Piazza's book, Celebrity, Inc., chronicles how a public appetite for celebrity antics caused the US media to create "faux-celebrities" out of whole cloth.
Produced by the BBC's Daniel Nasaw and David Botti
Photo/video: Reuters, Getty Images, AFP/Getty Images, Iconix Brand Group, Associated Press, NASA, and ThinkStock
"I wanna go up, I wanna be a star, I wanna have boobies..."
The reality of the celebrity money machine
How did US celebrity Kim Kardashian and her family make $65m (£41m) last year, when they can't act, play an instrument, sing, dance, or throw a ball?
While they have none of the talents that traditionally lead to fame and fortune, celebrities like Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Spencer Pratt, and the cast of The Jersey Shore make money from sponsorship deals for everything they do.
Author Jo Piazza's book, Celebrity, Inc., chronicles how a public appetite for celebrity antics caused the US media to create "faux-celebrities" out of whole cloth.
Produced by the BBC's Daniel Nasaw and David Botti
Photo/video: Reuters, Getty Images, AFP/Getty Images, Iconix Brand Group, Associated Press, NASA, and ThinkStock
Sunday 13 November 2011
Slavoj Zizek and Harum Scarum
By saying "Asian values" have corrupted capitalism, Zizek aligns himself with generations of Orientalist thinkers.
by Hamid Dabashi
In Gene Nelson's "Harum Scarum" (1965), featuring Elvis Presley as the Hollywood heartthrob Johnny Tyronne, we meet the action movie star travelling through the Orient while promoting his new film, "Sands of the Desert". Upon arrival, however, Elvis Presley/Johnny Tyronne is kidnapped by a gang of assassins led by a temptress "Oriental" named Aishah, who wish to hire him to carry out an assassination. Emboldened by proper "Western virtues", Elvis will do no such thing and manages to sing and dance his way out of the way of the conniving "Orientals".
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher, made a rather abrupt staccato observation - a hit-and-run strike worthy of an action hero - very much reminiscent of the fate of Elvis Presley and his Oriental sojourn:
"I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either anglo-saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values? I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy ... What I'm afraid of is, with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism much more efficient and dynamic than our western capitalism. But I don't share the hope of my liberal friends - give them ten years [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration - no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over."
What precisely are these "Asian values," when uttered by an Eastern European, we Asians of one sort or another may wonder? Did capitalism really have to travel all the way to China and Singapore (as Elvis did to the Orient) to lose all its proper Western virtues (and what exactly might they be) and become corrupted (or indeed carry its destructive forces to its logical conclusions)? So, are we to believe, when it flourishes in "the West", capitalism flowers in democracy and when it assumes "Asian values" it divorces that virtue and becomes a promiscuous monster?
Elvis Presley indeed. Let us rescue capitalism from that treacherous Aishah and her Asian values and have it go back to his Western virtues.
What Zizek is warning the world against is capitalism with its newly acquired "Asian values", as distinct from what he calls "our [his] Western capitalism", he insists, obviously adorned with "Western virtues" - which promiscuity has already resulted in decoupling the happily-ever-after marriage of capitalism and democracy. In other words, capitalism "Western style" brought the world the fruit of democracy, and capitalism with "Asian values" becomes ... what, well obviously not democratic, but instead driven to its extreme ends, namely totalitarianism, fascism, coldblooded, cutthroat, capitalism - none of which was evidently in sight at the birthplace of capitalism and democracy: "the West". The proposition becomes "curiouser and curiouser" - as Alice would say. Is that Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Taoism, anticolonial nationalism, Third World Socialism, Satyajit Ray's realism, Akira Kurosawa's, Kiarostami's, perhaps - which "Asian values" have replaced the proper Protestant ethics and corrupted the good old spirit of capitalism - one might wonder, for we Asian followers of Al Jazeera and its featured interviews are at a loss here?
Why is it that the marriage of capitalism to "Asian values", whatever they are, results in calamity while when it was happily married to "the West", it had given the world the gift of democracy? Should we think of these "Asian values" as a treacherous harlot, or perhaps a harem full of temptresses (Aishahs to Zizek's Elvis Presley) who have seduced the poor old capitalism and led him astray to divorce his pious spouse "the West", and abandon their beloved child - democracy? The metaphor is quite amusing - were it not revealing more than Elvis Presley wished to sing in this particular desert.
Zizek's pedigree
That "Asian values" (we are on a blind date here for we have no blasted clue what they are) should bring out the worst in capitalism - and thus the "Orientals" who gave birth to these values lacking any decent, emancipatory, liberating thoughts or dreams - is no invention of Zizek. The thought is deeply rooted in European philosophy.
On more than one occasion Emanuel Levinas (1906-1995) - the distinguished Lithuanian phenomenologist - who was no Elvis Presley and positively lacked all manners of antics and theatricalities in his thoughts and manners - went out of his way to dismiss the non-European as non-human. "When I speak of Europe," he wrote, "I think about the gathering of humanity. Only in the European sense can the world be gathered together ... in this sense Buddhism can be said just as well in Greek."
The problem is that if humanity were to follow Levinas' decree and gather in Europe to become human they are not welcomed there - and will first have to shave their beards, take certain items of their clothing off, change the colour of their skins, chop off portions of their nose, alter the pigment of their eyes, and Almighty only knows what else to become human. Staying what and who they are, how they were born, they are no human - in the eye of the ethical philosopher who famously sought the sight of the (European) knowing subject in an encounter with "the face of the other".
"I often say," Levinas said (not once or twice, but "often"), "although it is a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks. All the rest can be translated: all the rest - all the exotic - is dance."
So these "Asian values" that Zizek has in mind might perhaps have something to do with our habitual Asian dancing moves - the way his European predecessor thought of all we have ever thought or done. Though one may remain baffled as to why this "is a dangerous thing to say publicly" - what Levinas was wont of saying frequently.
"I always say," again Levinas confesses that he is quite fond of thinking this way, "but under my breath," he stipulates, "that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing. There is no racism intended."
Of course no racism was intended - and no racism was taken, sir. This is just a pure phenomenological truth that we Asians like to dance a lot and become human only to the degree by which we can come close to the Bible and the Greeks. But the question remains: do we, sir, stop dancing when we pick up your Bible and befriend the Greeks - can we manage to sit still and perhaps learn a thing or two to correct our Asian ways?
Geography and history be damned - the Bible came into being in Asia, the Greeks and their philosophies were known in Asia centuries before "Europe" was invented as a civilisational category - in the mind of the ethical philosopher we poor Asian folks become alien to what we have in fact produced and what we have known.
Why (we might, caught as we are in our "Asian values" wonder) would a philosopher single out to denounce non-European thinking as not just irrelevant, but in fact non-human? Why just privileging the European (and their take on the Bible) as the only thing that matter - as the only thing human?
There is now an entire industry dedicated to dissecting Heidegger's philosophy not as incidental but in fact as definitive to Nazism - and rightly so. But re-read these sentences: is Levinas any less integral to Zionism than Heidegger was to Nazism? Is it strange, with that kind of philosophical imprimatur from probably the most prominent Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century that Israelis do not consider Palestinians human? Even after the horrors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, Levinas, in a famous radio interview, refused even to acknowledge Palestinians as human enough to be his "other". He said his definition of the other was "completely different" - and concluded that: "There are people who are wrong." In his thinking Levinas looked at Palestinians and with them at Arabs, Muslims, the whole world outside Europe and their take on the Hebrew Bible through the gun barrel of the Israeli soldiers: a moving target, a dancing duck.
From Zizek to Levinas to Kant
Even Levinas should not be singled out, as the origin of this illustrious record of dislodging humanity at large from the fold of "the West" as the single site of what it means to be human. "What trifling grotesqueries do the verbose and studied compliments of the Chinese contain!" That is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the father of the European Enlightenment. Kant insists: "Even their paintings [that is Chinese painting] are grotesque and portray strange and unnatural figures such as are encountered nowhere in the world. They also have the venerable grotesqueries because they are of very ancient custom, and no nation in the world has more of these than this one." When Zizek says capitalism is now corrupted with "Asian values" and is no longer conducive to democracy the way "our [his] Western capitalism" maybe he had these "grotesqueries" of Kantian vintage in mind. One never knows.
Kant was not particular about the Chinese, to be sure. He was quite ecumenical and cosmopolitan in this regard: "All these savages" - here he is talking about Native Americans - "have little feeling for the beautiful in moral understanding, and the generous forgiveness of an injury, which is at once noble and beautiful, is completely unknown as a virtue among the savages, but rather is disdained as a miserable cowardice."
Similar sentiments are also applicable to Indians and the rest of humanity - though minus Africa, where people of that particular continent have an exclusive claim on stupidity for Kant. Regarding an African who might have said something worthy of Kant's regards, the father of the European Enlightenment states: "And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid."
The only way that some "Orientals" were to approximate humanity was if they were to become like Europeans - for which Kant volunteered Arabs as Spaniards, Persians as French, and Japanese as Englishmen.
The point here is not to give a litany of colourful skeletons hiding in the closets of European philosophy, or to reduce that multifaceted philosophical tradition to these unsavoury revelations, or to dismiss the entirety of a philosophical heritage based on these scattered comments. European philosophy, like any other philosophy the world over issued from the vantage point of power and hubris (including the philosophical heritage of empires of Arabs, Iranians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, etc), ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous. Nor is the point to cater to a vulgar nativism, which has been one particularly unfortunate byproduct of Edward Said's Orientalism. From within European philosophy itself, much critical and emancipatory reactions to such racist proclivities have been widely evident. The point, rather, is to mark the historic enabling of any philosophical legacy by the imperial power of denying it to others. What unites Kant, Levinas, and Zizek (among many others) is that their self-universalising philosophies are invariably predicated on denying others the capacity to think critically or creatively by way of enabling, authorising, and empowering themselves to think for the world.
That world, however, is coming to an end - and folks like Zizek have no blasted clue how to read the change. They write a piece for London Review of Books denouncing anything from the Arab Spring to European uprisings in Spain and Greece as pointless one day, and next day they pop up in the Zuccotti Park in Wall Street reading redundant and silly stories about a Walt Disney cat falling from the precipice and not noticing it - that cat is in fact Zizek himself and his brand of philosophy - all it has to do is just look down and it is no more.
Can the Arabs think?
That when capitalism is with "the West" it begat democracy and when it went wayward with "Asian values" it became positively promiscuous is predicated on the idea that "Orientals" (a la Kant and Levinas' reading of them) are incapable of thinking on their own feet (for they are black and too busy dancing), produce ideas - rebellious, principled, and defiant ideas - a proposition that has now found its way from the hidden pages of European philosophy to the leading articles in North American newspapers. The New York Times, for example, believes that - contrary to all other revolutions - there are no thinkers for the Arab Spring:
It has not yet yielded any clear political or economic project, or any intellectual standard-bearers of the kind who shaped almost every modern revolution from 1776 onward. In those revolts, thinkers or ideologues - from Thomas Paine to Lenin to Mao to Vaclav Hevel - helped provide a unifying vision or became symbols of a people's aspirations.
The immediate thought that might occur to a groovy "Oriental" is just a sense of wonder: we now have had even longer years of recent uprising in Europe, from workers in Greece to the Indignados in Spain to students and looters in the UK - a succession of uprisings that in fact predates the Arab Spring - and who exactly, prithee, is the leading "intellectual standard-bearers of the kind who shaped almost every modern revolution from 1776 onward." Zizek? What about in the US - people have been revolting against the bailing out of banks long before the Occupy Wall Street began in Fall 2011. Exactly which prominent US intellectual does the New York Times have in mind that Arabs have failed to match? Michael Moore? Michael Moore and Zizek are perfectly fine activists who can go to Al Jazeera or the Keith Olbermann show and express solidarity with a social uprising. But in what way have the Arabs failed to match these or any other thinker, activist, public intellectual?
What appears to the New York Times as an absence of leading Arab intellectuals deeply engaged with their revolutions is not just a projection of ignorance. It is a confusion of the order of things. There is nothing the matter with the Arab Spring - or the European Summer, or the American Fall for that matter. This is a winter of global discontent that the New York Times fails to read and thus asks flawed questions, putting the proverbial cart of these revolts before the horse.
Like all other revolutionary uprisings, the Arab Spring is generating its own thinkers. Marx did not cause the revolutions of 1848, the revolutions of 1848 created Marx, as did the American Revolution Thomas Paine, the Russian revolution Lenin, etc. The hands of the New York Times are too far away even from the Zuccotti Park under its own nose let alone from the pulse of the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square to know where its thinking takes place - precisely as Zizek pathologises "Asian values" with having exacerbated the disease of capitalism so that his body-philosophy can be cleansed for renewed thinking - having disqualified "Asians" from any such emancipatory ideas - not in opposition to the delusion of "the West", but in apposition to the emerging world they are helping shape.
Overthrowing the regime of knowledge
When people from one end of the Arab and Muslim world to another cry "people demand the overthrow of the regime", they mean more than just their political regime. They also mean the regime of knowledge that does not see from pogroms to the Holocaust as equally embedded in "Western values", does not see Nazism in Germany, Fascism in Italy and Spain, Totalitarianism in Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe (Zizek's own backyard), horrid racism across the European history, and all other sorts of diseases spreading from one end of Europe to another as coterminous with capitalism while married to the West - and cherry picks democracy as their only offspring, and when aterritorial capitalism wreaks havoc like a bubonic plague around the globe he looks for an flu strain he calls "Asian values".
Orientalising capitalism retroactively Westernises an authenticity, for it that is entirely antithetical to its globalising proclivity from the get go. Zizek seeing its demise in its Orientalisation reflects back on Max Weber's attempt to seek its origin in the Protestant ethics - from Weber to Zizek missing entirely on the aterritorial disposition of capitalism in its very inception.
Far more important than any ethnicisation of a global calamity called capitalism is the vista of liberating ideas that accompany - not lead - these uprisings in successive seasons of our discontent. Here, fortunately, East and West, or being Asian, African, Latin American, European, or American no longer makes any difference. The divisive world of "the West and the rest" no longer exists. We are on the verge of a new dispensation, a new world we are about to discover. In the making of that future, we, ordinary folks the world over, may occasionally look back at these prominent European philosophers - from Kant to Levinas to Zizek - without any rancour or jest and simply ask ourselves if, with that depth of dismissal and denigration - categorically pathologising humanity at large outside their European tunnel vision - they have anything to say about the liberating vistas of the emerging world. As a philosopher Zizek is the very last whimper of that bang called "the West" that had frightened the world out of the necessary confidence to generate any idea they never dreamt in their philosophies - for to them whatever we say is "grotesquery," whatever we do is "dancing", for we are (and in that emancipatory acclamation Zizek is welcome to join us) "quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what we say is stupid".
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. Among his most recent books is Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (2008).
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
by Hamid Dabashi
In Gene Nelson's "Harum Scarum" (1965), featuring Elvis Presley as the Hollywood heartthrob Johnny Tyronne, we meet the action movie star travelling through the Orient while promoting his new film, "Sands of the Desert". Upon arrival, however, Elvis Presley/Johnny Tyronne is kidnapped by a gang of assassins led by a temptress "Oriental" named Aishah, who wish to hire him to carry out an assassination. Emboldened by proper "Western virtues", Elvis will do no such thing and manages to sing and dance his way out of the way of the conniving "Orientals".
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher, made a rather abrupt staccato observation - a hit-and-run strike worthy of an action hero - very much reminiscent of the fate of Elvis Presley and his Oriental sojourn:
"I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either anglo-saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values? I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy ... What I'm afraid of is, with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism much more efficient and dynamic than our western capitalism. But I don't share the hope of my liberal friends - give them ten years [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration - no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over."
What precisely are these "Asian values," when uttered by an Eastern European, we Asians of one sort or another may wonder? Did capitalism really have to travel all the way to China and Singapore (as Elvis did to the Orient) to lose all its proper Western virtues (and what exactly might they be) and become corrupted (or indeed carry its destructive forces to its logical conclusions)? So, are we to believe, when it flourishes in "the West", capitalism flowers in democracy and when it assumes "Asian values" it divorces that virtue and becomes a promiscuous monster?
Elvis Presley indeed. Let us rescue capitalism from that treacherous Aishah and her Asian values and have it go back to his Western virtues.
What Zizek is warning the world against is capitalism with its newly acquired "Asian values", as distinct from what he calls "our [his] Western capitalism", he insists, obviously adorned with "Western virtues" - which promiscuity has already resulted in decoupling the happily-ever-after marriage of capitalism and democracy. In other words, capitalism "Western style" brought the world the fruit of democracy, and capitalism with "Asian values" becomes ... what, well obviously not democratic, but instead driven to its extreme ends, namely totalitarianism, fascism, coldblooded, cutthroat, capitalism - none of which was evidently in sight at the birthplace of capitalism and democracy: "the West". The proposition becomes "curiouser and curiouser" - as Alice would say. Is that Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Taoism, anticolonial nationalism, Third World Socialism, Satyajit Ray's realism, Akira Kurosawa's, Kiarostami's, perhaps - which "Asian values" have replaced the proper Protestant ethics and corrupted the good old spirit of capitalism - one might wonder, for we Asian followers of Al Jazeera and its featured interviews are at a loss here?
Why is it that the marriage of capitalism to "Asian values", whatever they are, results in calamity while when it was happily married to "the West", it had given the world the gift of democracy? Should we think of these "Asian values" as a treacherous harlot, or perhaps a harem full of temptresses (Aishahs to Zizek's Elvis Presley) who have seduced the poor old capitalism and led him astray to divorce his pious spouse "the West", and abandon their beloved child - democracy? The metaphor is quite amusing - were it not revealing more than Elvis Presley wished to sing in this particular desert.
Zizek's pedigree
That "Asian values" (we are on a blind date here for we have no blasted clue what they are) should bring out the worst in capitalism - and thus the "Orientals" who gave birth to these values lacking any decent, emancipatory, liberating thoughts or dreams - is no invention of Zizek. The thought is deeply rooted in European philosophy.
On more than one occasion Emanuel Levinas (1906-1995) - the distinguished Lithuanian phenomenologist - who was no Elvis Presley and positively lacked all manners of antics and theatricalities in his thoughts and manners - went out of his way to dismiss the non-European as non-human. "When I speak of Europe," he wrote, "I think about the gathering of humanity. Only in the European sense can the world be gathered together ... in this sense Buddhism can be said just as well in Greek."
The problem is that if humanity were to follow Levinas' decree and gather in Europe to become human they are not welcomed there - and will first have to shave their beards, take certain items of their clothing off, change the colour of their skins, chop off portions of their nose, alter the pigment of their eyes, and Almighty only knows what else to become human. Staying what and who they are, how they were born, they are no human - in the eye of the ethical philosopher who famously sought the sight of the (European) knowing subject in an encounter with "the face of the other".
"I often say," Levinas said (not once or twice, but "often"), "although it is a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks. All the rest can be translated: all the rest - all the exotic - is dance."
So these "Asian values" that Zizek has in mind might perhaps have something to do with our habitual Asian dancing moves - the way his European predecessor thought of all we have ever thought or done. Though one may remain baffled as to why this "is a dangerous thing to say publicly" - what Levinas was wont of saying frequently.
"I always say," again Levinas confesses that he is quite fond of thinking this way, "but under my breath," he stipulates, "that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing. There is no racism intended."
Of course no racism was intended - and no racism was taken, sir. This is just a pure phenomenological truth that we Asians like to dance a lot and become human only to the degree by which we can come close to the Bible and the Greeks. But the question remains: do we, sir, stop dancing when we pick up your Bible and befriend the Greeks - can we manage to sit still and perhaps learn a thing or two to correct our Asian ways?
Geography and history be damned - the Bible came into being in Asia, the Greeks and their philosophies were known in Asia centuries before "Europe" was invented as a civilisational category - in the mind of the ethical philosopher we poor Asian folks become alien to what we have in fact produced and what we have known.
Why (we might, caught as we are in our "Asian values" wonder) would a philosopher single out to denounce non-European thinking as not just irrelevant, but in fact non-human? Why just privileging the European (and their take on the Bible) as the only thing that matter - as the only thing human?
There is now an entire industry dedicated to dissecting Heidegger's philosophy not as incidental but in fact as definitive to Nazism - and rightly so. But re-read these sentences: is Levinas any less integral to Zionism than Heidegger was to Nazism? Is it strange, with that kind of philosophical imprimatur from probably the most prominent Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century that Israelis do not consider Palestinians human? Even after the horrors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, Levinas, in a famous radio interview, refused even to acknowledge Palestinians as human enough to be his "other". He said his definition of the other was "completely different" - and concluded that: "There are people who are wrong." In his thinking Levinas looked at Palestinians and with them at Arabs, Muslims, the whole world outside Europe and their take on the Hebrew Bible through the gun barrel of the Israeli soldiers: a moving target, a dancing duck.
From Zizek to Levinas to Kant
Even Levinas should not be singled out, as the origin of this illustrious record of dislodging humanity at large from the fold of "the West" as the single site of what it means to be human. "What trifling grotesqueries do the verbose and studied compliments of the Chinese contain!" That is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the father of the European Enlightenment. Kant insists: "Even their paintings [that is Chinese painting] are grotesque and portray strange and unnatural figures such as are encountered nowhere in the world. They also have the venerable grotesqueries because they are of very ancient custom, and no nation in the world has more of these than this one." When Zizek says capitalism is now corrupted with "Asian values" and is no longer conducive to democracy the way "our [his] Western capitalism" maybe he had these "grotesqueries" of Kantian vintage in mind. One never knows.
Kant was not particular about the Chinese, to be sure. He was quite ecumenical and cosmopolitan in this regard: "All these savages" - here he is talking about Native Americans - "have little feeling for the beautiful in moral understanding, and the generous forgiveness of an injury, which is at once noble and beautiful, is completely unknown as a virtue among the savages, but rather is disdained as a miserable cowardice."
Similar sentiments are also applicable to Indians and the rest of humanity - though minus Africa, where people of that particular continent have an exclusive claim on stupidity for Kant. Regarding an African who might have said something worthy of Kant's regards, the father of the European Enlightenment states: "And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid."
The only way that some "Orientals" were to approximate humanity was if they were to become like Europeans - for which Kant volunteered Arabs as Spaniards, Persians as French, and Japanese as Englishmen.
The point here is not to give a litany of colourful skeletons hiding in the closets of European philosophy, or to reduce that multifaceted philosophical tradition to these unsavoury revelations, or to dismiss the entirety of a philosophical heritage based on these scattered comments. European philosophy, like any other philosophy the world over issued from the vantage point of power and hubris (including the philosophical heritage of empires of Arabs, Iranians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, etc), ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous. Nor is the point to cater to a vulgar nativism, which has been one particularly unfortunate byproduct of Edward Said's Orientalism. From within European philosophy itself, much critical and emancipatory reactions to such racist proclivities have been widely evident. The point, rather, is to mark the historic enabling of any philosophical legacy by the imperial power of denying it to others. What unites Kant, Levinas, and Zizek (among many others) is that their self-universalising philosophies are invariably predicated on denying others the capacity to think critically or creatively by way of enabling, authorising, and empowering themselves to think for the world.
That world, however, is coming to an end - and folks like Zizek have no blasted clue how to read the change. They write a piece for London Review of Books denouncing anything from the Arab Spring to European uprisings in Spain and Greece as pointless one day, and next day they pop up in the Zuccotti Park in Wall Street reading redundant and silly stories about a Walt Disney cat falling from the precipice and not noticing it - that cat is in fact Zizek himself and his brand of philosophy - all it has to do is just look down and it is no more.
Can the Arabs think?
That when capitalism is with "the West" it begat democracy and when it went wayward with "Asian values" it became positively promiscuous is predicated on the idea that "Orientals" (a la Kant and Levinas' reading of them) are incapable of thinking on their own feet (for they are black and too busy dancing), produce ideas - rebellious, principled, and defiant ideas - a proposition that has now found its way from the hidden pages of European philosophy to the leading articles in North American newspapers. The New York Times, for example, believes that - contrary to all other revolutions - there are no thinkers for the Arab Spring:
It has not yet yielded any clear political or economic project, or any intellectual standard-bearers of the kind who shaped almost every modern revolution from 1776 onward. In those revolts, thinkers or ideologues - from Thomas Paine to Lenin to Mao to Vaclav Hevel - helped provide a unifying vision or became symbols of a people's aspirations.
The immediate thought that might occur to a groovy "Oriental" is just a sense of wonder: we now have had even longer years of recent uprising in Europe, from workers in Greece to the Indignados in Spain to students and looters in the UK - a succession of uprisings that in fact predates the Arab Spring - and who exactly, prithee, is the leading "intellectual standard-bearers of the kind who shaped almost every modern revolution from 1776 onward." Zizek? What about in the US - people have been revolting against the bailing out of banks long before the Occupy Wall Street began in Fall 2011. Exactly which prominent US intellectual does the New York Times have in mind that Arabs have failed to match? Michael Moore? Michael Moore and Zizek are perfectly fine activists who can go to Al Jazeera or the Keith Olbermann show and express solidarity with a social uprising. But in what way have the Arabs failed to match these or any other thinker, activist, public intellectual?
What appears to the New York Times as an absence of leading Arab intellectuals deeply engaged with their revolutions is not just a projection of ignorance. It is a confusion of the order of things. There is nothing the matter with the Arab Spring - or the European Summer, or the American Fall for that matter. This is a winter of global discontent that the New York Times fails to read and thus asks flawed questions, putting the proverbial cart of these revolts before the horse.
Like all other revolutionary uprisings, the Arab Spring is generating its own thinkers. Marx did not cause the revolutions of 1848, the revolutions of 1848 created Marx, as did the American Revolution Thomas Paine, the Russian revolution Lenin, etc. The hands of the New York Times are too far away even from the Zuccotti Park under its own nose let alone from the pulse of the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square to know where its thinking takes place - precisely as Zizek pathologises "Asian values" with having exacerbated the disease of capitalism so that his body-philosophy can be cleansed for renewed thinking - having disqualified "Asians" from any such emancipatory ideas - not in opposition to the delusion of "the West", but in apposition to the emerging world they are helping shape.
Overthrowing the regime of knowledge
When people from one end of the Arab and Muslim world to another cry "people demand the overthrow of the regime", they mean more than just their political regime. They also mean the regime of knowledge that does not see from pogroms to the Holocaust as equally embedded in "Western values", does not see Nazism in Germany, Fascism in Italy and Spain, Totalitarianism in Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe (Zizek's own backyard), horrid racism across the European history, and all other sorts of diseases spreading from one end of Europe to another as coterminous with capitalism while married to the West - and cherry picks democracy as their only offspring, and when aterritorial capitalism wreaks havoc like a bubonic plague around the globe he looks for an flu strain he calls "Asian values".
Orientalising capitalism retroactively Westernises an authenticity, for it that is entirely antithetical to its globalising proclivity from the get go. Zizek seeing its demise in its Orientalisation reflects back on Max Weber's attempt to seek its origin in the Protestant ethics - from Weber to Zizek missing entirely on the aterritorial disposition of capitalism in its very inception.
Far more important than any ethnicisation of a global calamity called capitalism is the vista of liberating ideas that accompany - not lead - these uprisings in successive seasons of our discontent. Here, fortunately, East and West, or being Asian, African, Latin American, European, or American no longer makes any difference. The divisive world of "the West and the rest" no longer exists. We are on the verge of a new dispensation, a new world we are about to discover. In the making of that future, we, ordinary folks the world over, may occasionally look back at these prominent European philosophers - from Kant to Levinas to Zizek - without any rancour or jest and simply ask ourselves if, with that depth of dismissal and denigration - categorically pathologising humanity at large outside their European tunnel vision - they have anything to say about the liberating vistas of the emerging world. As a philosopher Zizek is the very last whimper of that bang called "the West" that had frightened the world out of the necessary confidence to generate any idea they never dreamt in their philosophies - for to them whatever we say is "grotesquery," whatever we do is "dancing", for we are (and in that emancipatory acclamation Zizek is welcome to join us) "quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what we say is stupid".
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. Among his most recent books is Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (2008).
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Tuesday 4 October 2011
Dosarele de presă „Ceandalaua” ca destin istoric
02 Mai 2011 Adrian Majuru
Moto: „Toată lumea se va înţigăni, chiar de vom umbla numai în maşini şi vom mânca numai icre negre!” (I.D. Sîrbu, 1956)
Se pare că această profeţie a scriitorului I.D. Sîrbu, detaliată în romanul său „Lupul şi Catedrala”, a început să prindă contur de când cu promovarea cuvântului „rrom” în detrimentul milenarului „ţigan”. În toată copilăria mea nu am auzit vorbindu-se decât despre ţigani, iar această periculoasă şi forţată substituire, cu lungă trimitere, dintre român şi rrom, a explodat artificial după 1990.
Foarte interesant căci în tot arealul european nu avem nicăieri cuvântul „rrom” care să-i desemneze pe ţigani: în spaniolă avem Gitano; în italiană, Zingaro; în franceză, Gitane; în sârbo-croată, Ciganin; în slovenă, Cigan; în maghiară, Cigány, în poloneză şi rusă, Cygan; în limba turcă, çengene.
Cuvântul românesc Ţigan derivă din slavul (a)Ciganinŭ (Al. Ciorănescu, 2002). Aşadar, popoarele Europei au cunoscut simultan povestea unei populaţii unice, cultural şi comportamental.
A existat în istoria noastră o categorie socială mai de plâns decât aceea a robilor ţigani. A fost starea de „rumânie” din spaţiul muntenesc echivalentă cu iobăgia. Aristocraţia liberală de la 1848 a ales să evacueze starea de „rumânie”, care, deşi a fost desfiinţată încă din 1748 prin reforma lui Constantin Mavrocordat, mai trebuia alungată şi din sufletele oamenilor, or, codul civil nu era de ajuns. De aceea au ales să numească tânărul stat creat la 1859 România, după o scurtă perioadă de coabitare moldo-valahă. Cu toţii deveniseră români, egali prin lege. Astfel, cuvântul „ţigan” ar trebui asumat, şi nu înlocuit cu un periculos subterfugiu lingvistic.
Dincolo de aceasta se află ceandalaua ca destin istoric. Termenul nu este cuprins în dicţionare. Este mai degrabă circumscris unei istorii care vine de departe, dintr-un alt areal cultural, pe cale a se împământeni pe meleagurile noastre.
Potrivit unor opinii, ţiganii noştri ar fi sosit pe filieră otomană. În timpul campaniilor militare turceşti din secolul al XIV-lea şi până la asediul Vienei, şatrele erau adevărate accesorii de îngrozire a duşmanului. Stăteau ascunse în spatele trupelor de avangardă şi urlau, zbierau, băteau în talere de metal, pentru a da senzaţia unei mulţimi militare fioroase. Turcii i-au folosit astfel în timpul campaniilor lor. Cu regimul fanariot, când acţiunile turceşti au încetat, devenind o problemă supravieţuirea militară, aceste populaţii hinduse au fost aruncate peste Dunăre, colonizate aici masiv, cu acordul dezinteresat al grecilor din Fanar care guvernau raialele economice ale Munteniei şi Moldovei (dr. Şerban Milcoveanu, 2005).
Petre Pandrea a căutat şi el un răspuns infiltrărilor hinduse în spaţiul românesc: „În «Upanişade» am găsit texte relative la infractori. Cum îi pedepseau? Prin izgonire din imperiul indian. Printr-o judecată sumară, pater familias îl declara ceandala pe delincvent” (Petre Pandrea, 2001). Cuvântul indian are echivalentul pe româneşte în „cinghinea”. Acest termen apare ca regionalism învechit şi înseamnă „obrăznicătură”, iar „cinghia” erau numite dansatoarele publice al căror dans din buric era numit adesea „cinghie” (Constantinescu-Dobridor, Gh. Bulgăr, 2002).
Cel lovit de ceandala trebuia să părăsească imediat casa. Nu avea voie să rămână în satul şi oraşul său şi nici în vreun sat sau oraş indian. Pleca în emigraţie. I se luau veşmintele şi i se dădeau zdrenţe. Nu avea voie să poarte podoabe de aur sau argint, ci numai podoabe din fier sau tinichea. Probabil din această interdicţie milenară există apetitul ţiganilor noştri pentru colanele şi inelele de aur masiv şi palatele cu multe camere nelocuite. „Ceandalaua poate fi criminal brahial vărsător de sânge, dar şi infractor în frac. Din primele două straturi se recrutează infractorii violenţei brahiale, din straturile ultime răsare criminalitatea în frac, iubitoare de venalitate, turpitudine şi lipsă de onoare” (Petre Pandrea, 2001).
Desigur se pune adesea problema de ce ţiganii altor regiuni europene sunt atât de diferiţi de aceia din Valahia? Aceasta se întâmplă pentru că ţiganii reprezintă un barometru social foarte fin privind nivelul de civilizaţie al popoarelor în mijlocul cărora sălăşluiesc timp de generaţii. Ei au preluat, forţat sau prin mimetism, calităţile şi defectele popoarelor în mijlocul cărora s-au aşezat. Calităţi şi defecte care au accentuat, menţinut sau eliminat efectul ceandalei. Privind spre reversul medaliei, ceandalaua s-a menţinut sau nu în funcţie de gradul de toleranţă al popoarelor care au acceptat-o. Paradoxal, chiar ţiganii spanioli sunt uimiţi de violenţa celor din România.
Spre deosebire de devălmăşia românească care atomizează orice ideal, orice individualitate - fenomen descris de Ştefan Zeletin în eseul „Din Ţara măgarilor” -, ţiganii au un instinct de solidaritate tribală uluitor. Regiunea Kosovo ne dovedeşte faptul că teritoriile zise naţionale nu sunt ale celor care le revendică, ci ale celor care le stăpânesc demografic. În anul 1994, în zona Olteniei, adică triunghiul Craiova – Drobeta Turnu-Severin – Tg.Jiu, „împăratul ţiganilor a vrut să proclame aici stat independent” (vezi „Adevărul”, 24 XI 2000, p. 11). Cum Europa se confruntă cu un proiect secular nereuşit pe măsura aşteptărilor sale, privind socializarea comunităţilor ţigăneşti de pe cuprinsul ei, asocierea dintre „român” şi „rrom” ar trebui să ne pună pe gânduri. Iar pe de altă parte, „a trăi într-un vast penitenciar, fără a fi avertizaţi, cum o facem noi, reprezintă o gravă imprudenţă. Criminaliştii nu acceptă amestecurile” (Petre Pandrea, 2001).
Revoltele italienilor şi spaniolilor faţă de violenţa ţiganilor din România certifică teoria ciocnirii civilizaţiilor detaliată de Samuel Huntington. Popoarele Europei occidentale nu sunt tolerante cu nesimţirea, murdăria şi agresivitatea plăsmuite sub indiferenţa lui „merge şi aşa”. Uniunea Europeană ar putea găsi „soluţii” împreună cu India, ţara de origine a acestor expulzaţi milenari, nimic altceva decât o extensie culturală şi de civilizaţie, care ar trebui să aibă şansa revenirii la matcă.
Despre cum putem fi induşi în eroare
Pe negândite se naşte un nou popor. Istoria se desfăşoară după reguli culturale, cu afecte profunde care scapă mulţimii. Ea se află în continuă mişcare chiar pe spaţii mici şi se metamorfozează permanent. În ceea ce-i priveşte pe români, astfel de metamorfozări s-au mai petrecut în istorie în aşa-numita „perioadă a invaziilor”, de fapt succesiuni de roiri nomade. Respectivele metamorfozări, studiate atent îndeosebi de lingvişti, au însemnat mai mult decât o „invazie”; ele au însemnat coabitări seculare între autohtoni şi cei veniţi în circumstanţe istorice complexe.
Ceea ce numim „slavizare”, perioada „cumano-tătară”, „suzeranitatea otomană”, au fost moduri de viaţă, de obiceiuri, de coduri comportamentale, de ierarhii sociale etc. Toate au durat sute de ani fiecare, politic vorbind, dar au continuat să evolueze către particularităţi pe care geografia umană a locului le mai păstrează. Acest lucru certifică faptul că, de fiecare dată, autohtonii au suferit amprentări profunde şi iremediable.
Nu ştim de ce pravilele interziceau în vechime, chiar cu pedeapsa capitală, căsătoriile dintre români şi robii ţigani, chiar eliberaţi antefactum. Românii nu aveau voie să se căsătorească cu ţigănci chiar eliberate din robie. A fost o realitate istorică şi socială, care, deşi aparţine Evului Mediu (vezi Pravila lui Matei Basarab din 1642), a avut o extindere bizară până la mijlocul secolului al XIX-lea!
Astăzi, fenomenul de aculturare este însă foarte interesant şi este în plină desfăşurare. Antropologic, etnia ţigănească urbanizată este destul de bine articulată istoric: gust pentru vestimentaţie, igienă, pe alocuri chiar fineţuri intelectuale de nivel mediu pe care arareori le întâlneşti printre fiii de muncitori care au colonizat Bucureştii în anii puterii populare. Acest progres este mai întâlnit la femei sau adolescente. La aceasta se adaugă o mare abilitate mercantilă, în creştere progresivă începând cu anii puterii populare, când mulţi ţigani au intrat în structurile statului, pe funcţii publice înalte sau medii, chiar dacă nu ştiau carte. Aveau “origine sănătoasă”. Cam de pe atunci centrul vechi al Bucureştiului a fost golit de realii proprietari şi colonizat cu aceia pe care-i vedem azi.
Dar ceea ce se ignoră sau, clinic vorbind, nu se înţelege sunt fenomenele socio-culturale şi antropologice care se desfăşoară pe un alt palier istoric decât acela cronologic, şi anume faptul că “natura îşi are secretele şi ironiile sale sociale. Ţiganii ar fi, în aparenţă, o seminţie de maidan, murdărie şi mizerie: dar sunt un organism ce trăieşte extraordinar de organic, conform unui instinct de solidaritate tribală uluitor. Adam Lendvay - tocmai pentru că e hipercult şi un hiperlucid observator al lumii şi istoriei - susţine că ţiganii sunt un fenomen social unic, excepţional şi - ai să râzi - de mare viitor” (I.D. Sîrbu, “Lupul şi Catedrala”, Editura Casa Şcoalelor 1995, ediţie îngrijită de Maria Graciov).
În această carte este descris crepusculul metamorfozărilor de azi, bing-bangul unei aculturaţii din care, noi, românii, am fost certamente induşi în eroare: „Ne-am mulţumit să-i izolăm, să-i dispreţuim şi să-i ignorăm... de departe. Trişând puţin cifrele reale ale numărului lor la recensăminte şi făcându-ne că plouă ori de câte ori mărginaşii oraşelor ridicau problema ţiganilor vecini şi «prieteni». Nu ştiu dacă am dreptate, dar mie mi se pare că întreg oraşul nostru - fost foarte boieresc - (este vorba de Craiova n.m.), ca şi capitala, de altfel, este clădit pe o destul de intensă baltă de ţigănime, prolifică, beată, absentă din istorie, dar prezentă în realitate. Nu ştiu dacă se poate vorbi de o «explozie demografică» la ei, în orice caz, în timp ce noi, «albii», ne chinuim să ne înmulţim măcar în progresie aritmetică, ei, fără nici un efort sau încurajare, se înmulţesc în progresie geometrică. Priveam înfiorat această mulţime de lumpen-sclavi ai unei libertăţi total antisociale şi anistorice şi îmi dădeam seama că asist la o fantastică, misterioasă şi iraţională demonstraţie de vitalitate, supravieţuire, instinct tribal. (...)
Ungurii şi iugoslavii au catedre de specialitate, echipe sociologice care studiază ştiinţific căile de integrare a ţiganilor lor. La noi, deocamdată, nici usturoi nu au mâncat boierii noştri moşieri cu robi ţigani, şi nici gura noastră nu miroase a neatenţie şi ignoranţă. (...) Ţiganii trebuie priviţi şi înţeleşi nu din afară, de sus, de departe, ci dinlăuntrul lor. Raţiunea lor suficientă e ascunsă, e prelogică, total opusă criteriilor de progres, civilizaţie şi cultură. (...)
Singura etnie care, în esenţa ei, nu s-a schimbat nici măcar cu o iotă” în ciuda intemperiilor istorice ale ultimului secol „ar fi ţiganii. Miracolul lor ne apare cu atât mai evident, cu cât cercetările lor de sociologie, psihologie, patologie a popoarelor, filosofiile abisale ale culturilor, ca şi studiile de psihanaliză colectivă, toate, nu fac decât să scoată în relief trăsătura majoră a ţiganilor: ei nu doresc să fie mai mult decât sunt, altceva decât sunt, altfel decât sunt. Nu au nici un fel de conştiinţă socială sau politică - chiar dacă întregul lor comportament se bazează pe un fel de mândrie de a fi şi a rămâne, pe o teribilă încăpăţânare de a ignora istoria, revoluţiile, societatea. Nu au nevoie de contractul social, nu vor să ştie de acest contract. (...) Poate că această ciudată inundaţie dinspre maidane şi mahalale nu este decât o formă de semnalizare, un mod prin care inteligenţa defensivă a organismului nostru social, încă sănătos şi inteligent, ne atrage atenţia asupra unor realităţi pe care le ignorăm şi le subapreciem” (pp.276-277).
Şi subapreciate au rămas decenii de-a rândul. În ultimii 10-15 ani avem în sfârşit specialişti care au drept preocupare lumea ţigănească. Avem şi catedre de limbă “rromă”, cuvânt care dovedeşte că românii au pierdut bătălia până şi la detaliul lingvistic, căci există tendinţa ca „român” să fie înlocuit cu „rromân”! „Rrom”, la nivel symbolic, poate semnifica şi faptul că, spre deosebire de „rumânul” din vechime, sclav-şerb pe moşia boierului nu-i totuna cu „r”-ul adăugat, literă care înnobilează şi separă. Adolescenţii vechiului regat vorbesc deja cu accent pe vocală, lucru care dovedeşte semnificaţia practică a victoriei literei „r” suplimentare şi în limba uzuală. Preocupările culturale ale tinerelor generaţii sunt ataşate, chiar şi afectiv, de gustul asiatic al muzicii, iar de ceva timp chiar şi versuri coerente şi reuşite stilistic sunt armonizate pe melodii făcute pe calapod hindus. Nu ştiu exact cum stau lucrurile prin Ardeal, dar vechiul regat este în metamorfozare culturală şi demografică.
Social, s-a revenit la simbol, la ierarhia tribală, unde obiectul de prestigiu trebuie să fie strălucitor pentru a impune prestanţă şi a legitima puterea ca în imperiul lui Timur Lenk. Obiectele de prestigiu sunt fie din metal nobil (vezi ghiulurile, colanele, lanţurile pe care le poartă agresiv chiar şi românii cu bani), fie se singularizează prin unicitate (cea mai tare maşină, cea mai mega-vilă etc.).
În condiţiile în care aculturaţia a trecut de bariera sensibilă a unui posibil eşec, considerăm că nu ar mai fi necesară existenţa SISROM-ului, căci obiectivele sale oricum vor fi atinse în cel mult două decenii. Poporul român a fost (h)indus în eroare de istorie!
Moto: „Toată lumea se va înţigăni, chiar de vom umbla numai în maşini şi vom mânca numai icre negre!” (I.D. Sîrbu, 1956)
Se pare că această profeţie a scriitorului I.D. Sîrbu, detaliată în romanul său „Lupul şi Catedrala”, a început să prindă contur de când cu promovarea cuvântului „rrom” în detrimentul milenarului „ţigan”. În toată copilăria mea nu am auzit vorbindu-se decât despre ţigani, iar această periculoasă şi forţată substituire, cu lungă trimitere, dintre român şi rrom, a explodat artificial după 1990.
Foarte interesant căci în tot arealul european nu avem nicăieri cuvântul „rrom” care să-i desemneze pe ţigani: în spaniolă avem Gitano; în italiană, Zingaro; în franceză, Gitane; în sârbo-croată, Ciganin; în slovenă, Cigan; în maghiară, Cigány, în poloneză şi rusă, Cygan; în limba turcă, çengene.
Cuvântul românesc Ţigan derivă din slavul (a)Ciganinŭ (Al. Ciorănescu, 2002). Aşadar, popoarele Europei au cunoscut simultan povestea unei populaţii unice, cultural şi comportamental.
A existat în istoria noastră o categorie socială mai de plâns decât aceea a robilor ţigani. A fost starea de „rumânie” din spaţiul muntenesc echivalentă cu iobăgia. Aristocraţia liberală de la 1848 a ales să evacueze starea de „rumânie”, care, deşi a fost desfiinţată încă din 1748 prin reforma lui Constantin Mavrocordat, mai trebuia alungată şi din sufletele oamenilor, or, codul civil nu era de ajuns. De aceea au ales să numească tânărul stat creat la 1859 România, după o scurtă perioadă de coabitare moldo-valahă. Cu toţii deveniseră români, egali prin lege. Astfel, cuvântul „ţigan” ar trebui asumat, şi nu înlocuit cu un periculos subterfugiu lingvistic.
Dincolo de aceasta se află ceandalaua ca destin istoric. Termenul nu este cuprins în dicţionare. Este mai degrabă circumscris unei istorii care vine de departe, dintr-un alt areal cultural, pe cale a se împământeni pe meleagurile noastre.
Potrivit unor opinii, ţiganii noştri ar fi sosit pe filieră otomană. În timpul campaniilor militare turceşti din secolul al XIV-lea şi până la asediul Vienei, şatrele erau adevărate accesorii de îngrozire a duşmanului. Stăteau ascunse în spatele trupelor de avangardă şi urlau, zbierau, băteau în talere de metal, pentru a da senzaţia unei mulţimi militare fioroase. Turcii i-au folosit astfel în timpul campaniilor lor. Cu regimul fanariot, când acţiunile turceşti au încetat, devenind o problemă supravieţuirea militară, aceste populaţii hinduse au fost aruncate peste Dunăre, colonizate aici masiv, cu acordul dezinteresat al grecilor din Fanar care guvernau raialele economice ale Munteniei şi Moldovei (dr. Şerban Milcoveanu, 2005).
Petre Pandrea a căutat şi el un răspuns infiltrărilor hinduse în spaţiul românesc: „În «Upanişade» am găsit texte relative la infractori. Cum îi pedepseau? Prin izgonire din imperiul indian. Printr-o judecată sumară, pater familias îl declara ceandala pe delincvent” (Petre Pandrea, 2001). Cuvântul indian are echivalentul pe româneşte în „cinghinea”. Acest termen apare ca regionalism învechit şi înseamnă „obrăznicătură”, iar „cinghia” erau numite dansatoarele publice al căror dans din buric era numit adesea „cinghie” (Constantinescu-Dobridor, Gh. Bulgăr, 2002).
Cel lovit de ceandala trebuia să părăsească imediat casa. Nu avea voie să rămână în satul şi oraşul său şi nici în vreun sat sau oraş indian. Pleca în emigraţie. I se luau veşmintele şi i se dădeau zdrenţe. Nu avea voie să poarte podoabe de aur sau argint, ci numai podoabe din fier sau tinichea. Probabil din această interdicţie milenară există apetitul ţiganilor noştri pentru colanele şi inelele de aur masiv şi palatele cu multe camere nelocuite. „Ceandalaua poate fi criminal brahial vărsător de sânge, dar şi infractor în frac. Din primele două straturi se recrutează infractorii violenţei brahiale, din straturile ultime răsare criminalitatea în frac, iubitoare de venalitate, turpitudine şi lipsă de onoare” (Petre Pandrea, 2001).
Desigur se pune adesea problema de ce ţiganii altor regiuni europene sunt atât de diferiţi de aceia din Valahia? Aceasta se întâmplă pentru că ţiganii reprezintă un barometru social foarte fin privind nivelul de civilizaţie al popoarelor în mijlocul cărora sălăşluiesc timp de generaţii. Ei au preluat, forţat sau prin mimetism, calităţile şi defectele popoarelor în mijlocul cărora s-au aşezat. Calităţi şi defecte care au accentuat, menţinut sau eliminat efectul ceandalei. Privind spre reversul medaliei, ceandalaua s-a menţinut sau nu în funcţie de gradul de toleranţă al popoarelor care au acceptat-o. Paradoxal, chiar ţiganii spanioli sunt uimiţi de violenţa celor din România.
Spre deosebire de devălmăşia românească care atomizează orice ideal, orice individualitate - fenomen descris de Ştefan Zeletin în eseul „Din Ţara măgarilor” -, ţiganii au un instinct de solidaritate tribală uluitor. Regiunea Kosovo ne dovedeşte faptul că teritoriile zise naţionale nu sunt ale celor care le revendică, ci ale celor care le stăpânesc demografic. În anul 1994, în zona Olteniei, adică triunghiul Craiova – Drobeta Turnu-Severin – Tg.Jiu, „împăratul ţiganilor a vrut să proclame aici stat independent” (vezi „Adevărul”, 24 XI 2000, p. 11). Cum Europa se confruntă cu un proiect secular nereuşit pe măsura aşteptărilor sale, privind socializarea comunităţilor ţigăneşti de pe cuprinsul ei, asocierea dintre „român” şi „rrom” ar trebui să ne pună pe gânduri. Iar pe de altă parte, „a trăi într-un vast penitenciar, fără a fi avertizaţi, cum o facem noi, reprezintă o gravă imprudenţă. Criminaliştii nu acceptă amestecurile” (Petre Pandrea, 2001).
Revoltele italienilor şi spaniolilor faţă de violenţa ţiganilor din România certifică teoria ciocnirii civilizaţiilor detaliată de Samuel Huntington. Popoarele Europei occidentale nu sunt tolerante cu nesimţirea, murdăria şi agresivitatea plăsmuite sub indiferenţa lui „merge şi aşa”. Uniunea Europeană ar putea găsi „soluţii” împreună cu India, ţara de origine a acestor expulzaţi milenari, nimic altceva decât o extensie culturală şi de civilizaţie, care ar trebui să aibă şansa revenirii la matcă.
Despre cum putem fi induşi în eroare
Pe negândite se naşte un nou popor. Istoria se desfăşoară după reguli culturale, cu afecte profunde care scapă mulţimii. Ea se află în continuă mişcare chiar pe spaţii mici şi se metamorfozează permanent. În ceea ce-i priveşte pe români, astfel de metamorfozări s-au mai petrecut în istorie în aşa-numita „perioadă a invaziilor”, de fapt succesiuni de roiri nomade. Respectivele metamorfozări, studiate atent îndeosebi de lingvişti, au însemnat mai mult decât o „invazie”; ele au însemnat coabitări seculare între autohtoni şi cei veniţi în circumstanţe istorice complexe.
Ceea ce numim „slavizare”, perioada „cumano-tătară”, „suzeranitatea otomană”, au fost moduri de viaţă, de obiceiuri, de coduri comportamentale, de ierarhii sociale etc. Toate au durat sute de ani fiecare, politic vorbind, dar au continuat să evolueze către particularităţi pe care geografia umană a locului le mai păstrează. Acest lucru certifică faptul că, de fiecare dată, autohtonii au suferit amprentări profunde şi iremediable.
Nu ştim de ce pravilele interziceau în vechime, chiar cu pedeapsa capitală, căsătoriile dintre români şi robii ţigani, chiar eliberaţi antefactum. Românii nu aveau voie să se căsătorească cu ţigănci chiar eliberate din robie. A fost o realitate istorică şi socială, care, deşi aparţine Evului Mediu (vezi Pravila lui Matei Basarab din 1642), a avut o extindere bizară până la mijlocul secolului al XIX-lea!
Astăzi, fenomenul de aculturare este însă foarte interesant şi este în plină desfăşurare. Antropologic, etnia ţigănească urbanizată este destul de bine articulată istoric: gust pentru vestimentaţie, igienă, pe alocuri chiar fineţuri intelectuale de nivel mediu pe care arareori le întâlneşti printre fiii de muncitori care au colonizat Bucureştii în anii puterii populare. Acest progres este mai întâlnit la femei sau adolescente. La aceasta se adaugă o mare abilitate mercantilă, în creştere progresivă începând cu anii puterii populare, când mulţi ţigani au intrat în structurile statului, pe funcţii publice înalte sau medii, chiar dacă nu ştiau carte. Aveau “origine sănătoasă”. Cam de pe atunci centrul vechi al Bucureştiului a fost golit de realii proprietari şi colonizat cu aceia pe care-i vedem azi.
Dar ceea ce se ignoră sau, clinic vorbind, nu se înţelege sunt fenomenele socio-culturale şi antropologice care se desfăşoară pe un alt palier istoric decât acela cronologic, şi anume faptul că “natura îşi are secretele şi ironiile sale sociale. Ţiganii ar fi, în aparenţă, o seminţie de maidan, murdărie şi mizerie: dar sunt un organism ce trăieşte extraordinar de organic, conform unui instinct de solidaritate tribală uluitor. Adam Lendvay - tocmai pentru că e hipercult şi un hiperlucid observator al lumii şi istoriei - susţine că ţiganii sunt un fenomen social unic, excepţional şi - ai să râzi - de mare viitor” (I.D. Sîrbu, “Lupul şi Catedrala”, Editura Casa Şcoalelor 1995, ediţie îngrijită de Maria Graciov).
În această carte este descris crepusculul metamorfozărilor de azi, bing-bangul unei aculturaţii din care, noi, românii, am fost certamente induşi în eroare: „Ne-am mulţumit să-i izolăm, să-i dispreţuim şi să-i ignorăm... de departe. Trişând puţin cifrele reale ale numărului lor la recensăminte şi făcându-ne că plouă ori de câte ori mărginaşii oraşelor ridicau problema ţiganilor vecini şi «prieteni». Nu ştiu dacă am dreptate, dar mie mi se pare că întreg oraşul nostru - fost foarte boieresc - (este vorba de Craiova n.m.), ca şi capitala, de altfel, este clădit pe o destul de intensă baltă de ţigănime, prolifică, beată, absentă din istorie, dar prezentă în realitate. Nu ştiu dacă se poate vorbi de o «explozie demografică» la ei, în orice caz, în timp ce noi, «albii», ne chinuim să ne înmulţim măcar în progresie aritmetică, ei, fără nici un efort sau încurajare, se înmulţesc în progresie geometrică. Priveam înfiorat această mulţime de lumpen-sclavi ai unei libertăţi total antisociale şi anistorice şi îmi dădeam seama că asist la o fantastică, misterioasă şi iraţională demonstraţie de vitalitate, supravieţuire, instinct tribal. (...)
Ungurii şi iugoslavii au catedre de specialitate, echipe sociologice care studiază ştiinţific căile de integrare a ţiganilor lor. La noi, deocamdată, nici usturoi nu au mâncat boierii noştri moşieri cu robi ţigani, şi nici gura noastră nu miroase a neatenţie şi ignoranţă. (...) Ţiganii trebuie priviţi şi înţeleşi nu din afară, de sus, de departe, ci dinlăuntrul lor. Raţiunea lor suficientă e ascunsă, e prelogică, total opusă criteriilor de progres, civilizaţie şi cultură. (...)
Singura etnie care, în esenţa ei, nu s-a schimbat nici măcar cu o iotă” în ciuda intemperiilor istorice ale ultimului secol „ar fi ţiganii. Miracolul lor ne apare cu atât mai evident, cu cât cercetările lor de sociologie, psihologie, patologie a popoarelor, filosofiile abisale ale culturilor, ca şi studiile de psihanaliză colectivă, toate, nu fac decât să scoată în relief trăsătura majoră a ţiganilor: ei nu doresc să fie mai mult decât sunt, altceva decât sunt, altfel decât sunt. Nu au nici un fel de conştiinţă socială sau politică - chiar dacă întregul lor comportament se bazează pe un fel de mândrie de a fi şi a rămâne, pe o teribilă încăpăţânare de a ignora istoria, revoluţiile, societatea. Nu au nevoie de contractul social, nu vor să ştie de acest contract. (...) Poate că această ciudată inundaţie dinspre maidane şi mahalale nu este decât o formă de semnalizare, un mod prin care inteligenţa defensivă a organismului nostru social, încă sănătos şi inteligent, ne atrage atenţia asupra unor realităţi pe care le ignorăm şi le subapreciem” (pp.276-277).
Şi subapreciate au rămas decenii de-a rândul. În ultimii 10-15 ani avem în sfârşit specialişti care au drept preocupare lumea ţigănească. Avem şi catedre de limbă “rromă”, cuvânt care dovedeşte că românii au pierdut bătălia până şi la detaliul lingvistic, căci există tendinţa ca „român” să fie înlocuit cu „rromân”! „Rrom”, la nivel symbolic, poate semnifica şi faptul că, spre deosebire de „rumânul” din vechime, sclav-şerb pe moşia boierului nu-i totuna cu „r”-ul adăugat, literă care înnobilează şi separă. Adolescenţii vechiului regat vorbesc deja cu accent pe vocală, lucru care dovedeşte semnificaţia practică a victoriei literei „r” suplimentare şi în limba uzuală. Preocupările culturale ale tinerelor generaţii sunt ataşate, chiar şi afectiv, de gustul asiatic al muzicii, iar de ceva timp chiar şi versuri coerente şi reuşite stilistic sunt armonizate pe melodii făcute pe calapod hindus. Nu ştiu exact cum stau lucrurile prin Ardeal, dar vechiul regat este în metamorfozare culturală şi demografică.
Social, s-a revenit la simbol, la ierarhia tribală, unde obiectul de prestigiu trebuie să fie strălucitor pentru a impune prestanţă şi a legitima puterea ca în imperiul lui Timur Lenk. Obiectele de prestigiu sunt fie din metal nobil (vezi ghiulurile, colanele, lanţurile pe care le poartă agresiv chiar şi românii cu bani), fie se singularizează prin unicitate (cea mai tare maşină, cea mai mega-vilă etc.).
În condiţiile în care aculturaţia a trecut de bariera sensibilă a unui posibil eşec, considerăm că nu ar mai fi necesară existenţa SISROM-ului, căci obiectivele sale oricum vor fi atinse în cel mult două decenii. Poporul român a fost (h)indus în eroare de istorie!
The Reign of the One Percenters
Income inequality and the death of culture in New York City
by Christopher Ketcham
This is an early release of an article that will be published in the November/December 2011 issue of Orion.
For my daughter’s benefit, so that she might know the enemy better, know what he looks like, where he nests, and when and where to throw eggs at his head, we start the tour at Wall Street. It’s hot. August. We’re sweating like old cheese.
Here are the monuments that matter, I tell her: the offices of Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon; the JPMorgan Chase tower up the block; around the corner, the AIG building. The structures dwarf us, imposing themselves skyward.
“Linked together like rat warrens, with air conditioning,” I tell her. “These are dangerous creatures, Léa. Sociopaths.”
She doesn’t know what sociopath means.
“It’s a person who doesn’t care about anybody but himself. Socio, meaning society—you, me, this city, civilization. Patho, like pathogen—carrying and spreading disease.”
Long roll of eyes.
I’m intent on making this a teachable moment for my daughter, who is fifteen, but I have to quit the vitriol, break it down for her. I have to explain why the tour is important, what it has to do with her, her friends, her generation, the future they will grow up into.
On a smaller scale, I want Léa to understand what New York, my birthplace and home, once beloved to me, is really about. Because I’m convinced that the beating heart of the city today is not its art galleries, its boutiques, its restaurants or bars, its theaters, its museums, nor its miserable remnants in manufacturing, nor its creative types—its writers, dancers, artists, sculptors, thinkers, musicians, or, god forbid, its journalists.
“Here,” I tell her, standing in the canyons of world finance, “is what New York is about. Sociopaths getting really rich while everyone else just sits on their asses and lets it happen.”
Cancer
Talk is cheap, anger without action is a turnoff, and even at fifteen my daughter sensed that her father’s rage was born of impotence. I thought of Mark Twain’s line, “The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.” A few weeks later, Léa was gone, back to France, where she lives with her mother. I had new material to chew into bitter cud. It was a report titled “Grow Together or Pull Further Apart?: Income Concentration Trends in New York,” issued in December 2010 by a Manhattan-based nonprofit called the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI). The twenty-five-page report only quantified in hard data what most New Yorkers—the ones struggling to survive (most of us)—understood instinctively as they watched their opportunities diminish over the past three decades.
New York, the FPI informs us, is now at the forefront of the maldistribution of wealth into the hands of the few that has been ongoing in America since 1980, which marked the beginning of a new Gilded Age. Out of the twenty-five largest cities, it is the most unequal city in the United States for income distribution. If it were a nation, it would come in as the fifteenth worst among 134 countries ranked by extremes of wealth and poverty—a banana republic without the death squads. It is the showcase for the top 1 percent of households, which in New York have an average annual income of $3.7 million. These top wealth recipients—let’s call them the One Percenters—took for themselves close to 44 percent of all income in New York during 2007 (the last year for which data is available). That’s a high bar for wealth concentration; it’s almost twice the record-high levels among the top 1 percent nationwide, who claimed 23.5 percent of all national income in 2007, a number not seen since the eve of the Great Depression. During the vaunted 2002–07 economic expansion—the housing-boom bubble that ended in our current calamity, this Great Recession—average income for the One Percenters in New York went up 119 percent. Meanwhile, the number of homeless in the city rose to an all-time high last year—higher even than during the Great Depression—with a record 113,000 men, women, and children, many of them comprising whole families, retreating night after night to municipal shelters.
But here’s the most astonishing fact: the One Percenters consist of just 34,000 households, about 90,000 people. Relative to the great mass of New Yorkers—9 million of us—they’re nobody. We could snow them under in a New York minute.
And yet the masses—the fireman, the policeman, the postal worker, the teacher, the journalist, the subway conductor, the construction worker, the social worker, the engineer, the architect, the barkeep, the musician, the receptionist, the nurse—have been the consistent losers since 1990. The real hourly median wage in New York between 1990 and 2007 fell by almost 9 percent. Young men and women aged twenty-five to thirty-four with a bachelor’s degree and a year-round job in New York saw their earnings drop 6 percent. Middle-income New Yorkers—defined broadly by the FPI as those drawing incomes between approximately $29,000 and $167,000—experienced a 19 percent decrease in earnings. Almost 11 percent of the population, about 900,000 people, live in what the federal government describes as “deep poverty,” which for a four-person family means an income of $10,500 (the average One Percenter household in New York makes about that same amount every day). About 50 percent of the households in the city have incomes below $30,000; their incomes have also been steadily declining since 1990. During the gala boom of 2002–07, the trend was unaltered: the average income in the bottom 95 percent of New York City households declined.
According to the FPI, the wealth of the One Percenters derives almost entirely from the operations of the sector known as “financial services,” whose preoccupation is something they call “financial innovation.” The One Percenters draw the top salaries at commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, credit card companies, insurance companies, stock brokerages. They are the suit people at Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan and AIG and Deutsche Bank. To get a sense for how their fortunes have blossomed, consider the fact that the largest twenty financial institutions in the U.S., almost all of them headquartered in New York, now control upward of 70 percent of the country’s financial assets, roughly double what they controlled in the 1990s.
And what do the suit people do to earn such heaping returns? At one time, the financial sector could be relied upon to allocate capital for the building of things that society needed—projects that also invariably created jobs. But productivity is no longer its purview. Lord Adair Turner, a financial watchdog and former banker in the city of London—the other world capital of finance—recently denounced his class as practitioners and beneficiaries of a “socially useless activity.” Paul Woolley, who runs a think tank in London called the Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, observed that the “presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable” was a kind of metaphysics. “It wasn’t backed by any empirical evidence,” Woolley told John Cassidy, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, futures exchanges, hedge funds, complex securitization and derivative pools, the tranching of mortgages—these were shown to have “little or no long-term value,” according to Cassidy. The purpose was to “merely shift money around” without designing, building, or selling “a single tangible thing.” The One Percenter seeks only exchange value, as opposed to real value. Thus foreign exchange currency gambling has skyrocketed to seventy-three times the actual goods and services of the planet, up from eleven times in 1980. Thus the “value” of oil futures has risen from 20 percent of actual physical production in 1980 to 1,000 percent today. Thus interest rate derivatives have gone from nil in 1980 to $390 trillion in 2009. The trading schemes float disembodied above the real economy, related to it only because without the real economy there would be nothing to exploit.
Behold, then, the One Percenter in his Wall Street tower. He creates “value” by tapping on keyboards and punching in algorithms. He makes money playing with money, manipulating abstractions. He manufactures and chases after financial bubbles and then pricks them. He speculates on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, the price of gas that keeps the real economy moving, the price of food that keeps the labor pool alive, always hedging his bets so that he comes out ahead whether society wins or loses. A study from the New Economics Foundation in England found that for every pound made in financial services in the city of London, roughly seven pounds of social wealth is lost—meaning the wealth of those in society who do productive work.
Finance as practiced on Wall Street, says Paul Woolley, is “like a cancer.” There is only maximization of short-term profit in these “financial services”—they are services only in the sense of the vampire at a vein. There is no vision for allocating capital for the building of infrastructure that will serve society in the future; no vision, say, for a post-carbon civilization; no vision for surviving the shocks of coming resource scarcity. The finance nihilist doesn’t look to a viable future; he is interested only in the immediate return.
Rotten Vegetables
The optimist will say that the wealth disparities in New York have been far worse in the past, and the optimist would be correct. When in 1869, for example, a young journalist named Henry George arrived in New York, already the most opulent city in America, he found that “amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry breasts.” The inequalities got worse. There came the Panics of 1873 and 1884, which resulted from the speculation and stock fraud of the city’s financial and business elite. Epicentered in lower Manhattan, the panics—we’d call them crashes today—produced nationwide shock waves of mass unemployment, homelessness, hunger, years of depression and dislocation, and, at times, the specter of all-out chaos. President Grover Cleveland, aghast at the scope of the division between the few very rich and the many poor, concluded that the “wealth and luxury of our cities,” primarily enjoyed by the industrial monopolists and the financier and Wall Street class, was “largely built upon undue exactions from the masses of our people.” The exactions in New York, as with every city where unregulated industrial capital ran amok, were most felt in the profitable horrors of wage slavery: the fourteen-hour workdays, the miserable pay, the children forced into labor, the dangerous conditions on factory floors, the rents extracted by landlords for the opportunity to live in windowless, rat-infested, soul-destroying tenements.
In answer, across New York City throughout the 1880s there were strikes, marches, boycotts, gigantic torch-lit demonstrations. New York’s Central Labor Union (CLU), a branch of the Knights of Labor, whose national membership approached 700,000, welcomed all the “producing classes,” skilled and unskilled: the bricklayers, the jewelers, the printers, the industrialized brewers and machinists, the salesclerks, bakers, cloak makers, cigar makers, piano makers, musicians, tailors, waiters, Morse operators, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, whites and blacks, men and women. The only people they refused to welcome in their ranks, wrote historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, were “bankers, brokers, speculators, gamblers, and liquor dealers”—what the Knights and other radicals of the time called the “fleecing classes,” the “parasites,” the “leeches.”
The CLU and the Knights organized the first Labor Day parade in the United States, on September 5, 1882, marching twenty thousand strong from City Hall to Union Square, unfurling banners that said: LABOR BUILT THIS REPUBLIC AND LABOR SHALL RULE IT. And: NO MONEY MONOPOLY. And: PAY NO RENT. The seamstresses along the route waved handkerchiefs from windows and blew kisses at the marchers. When the ladies at their sills saw cops and thugs hired by the fleecing classes, they rained down rocks, eggs, rotten vegetables.
By 1886, the labor coalition was looking for a radical candidate for mayor, and they found one in Henry George, who by then had become a famous writer, known on four continents. Seven years earlier, he had published a book of economics called Progress and Poverty that during the last decades of the nineteenth century would outsell every book but the Bible. His chief contribution was to acquaint the lay American with the problem of “economic rent” in society. This was defined as revenue with no corresponding labor or productivity; economic rent was unearned income.
Those who benefited from this income were known as rentiers, and the most egregious rentier in George’s day was the landlord, who, sitting on land as it rose in value, got rich on the backs of his tenants “without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota to the wealth of the community.” Political liberty required also economic liberty, said George, and economic liberty required doing away with the privileges of the rentier. “We are not called upon to guarantee all men equal conditions…but we are called upon to give to all men an equal chance,” said George. “If we do not, our republicanism is a snare and a delusion, our chatter about the rights of man the veriest buncombe.” George also proclaimed, “It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life.”
In declaring his candidacy, George decried the “principle of competition upon which society is now based.” He announced to an ecstatic public that his intention was “to raise hell!” He saw only corruption in government as it was then comprised, and suggested that “a revolutionary uprising might be necessary to turn out the praetorians who were doing the corporations’ bidding in government office.” But George was defeated in the 1886 campaign, and new and more advanced rentiers, typified by J. P. Morgan, with his offices at 23 Wall Street, rose to dominate the American political economy. By the turn of the twentieth century, Morgan had directed a massive consolidation of banking and, through the leverage of credit and debt, industry. This superconsolidation, which came to be known as monopoly finance capitalism, extended the influence of New York bankers nationwide to the point that, as Woodrow Wilson observed in 1911, “all our activities are in the hands of a few men” who “chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.”
It would take decades of labor unrest and protest, coupled with the near total collapse of monopoly finance capitalism after 1929, to smash the power of New Yorkers like Morgan and secure some measure of economic equality in the United States. The institutions exploited by the bankers—commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, stock brokerages—were broken up and regulated. Antitrust law barred the supersizing of corporations in mergers and acquisitions. The incomes of the very rich were heavily taxed. The finance rentier was placed in the cage where he belonged.
New York City stood at the forefront of the new progressivism. It was here that the nation’s first large-scale system of low-cost housing was built, here that some of the earliest labor and social welfare policies were developed and enforced—efforts to regulate working conditions on factory floors, reduce working hours, mandate equal pay for women. New York developed one of the largest social services sectors of any city in the United States. Its universities were free. It had twenty-two public hospitals. Its public transit system was the largest in the world, and cheap—you could ride fifteen miles for fifteen cents. It was still a city, with all the attendant ills of a metropolis, in many ways too big, entangled in bureaucracies, full of corruption and crime, congestion and pollution, racial and ethnic division. Yet by 1945, it was home to a strong and stable middle class, anchored in industry and the trades. It was becoming a city of equals. During this period of relative economic equality, roughly from World War II to around 1980—a period known to economic historians as the Great Compression, as income and wealth leveled out nationally following the reforms of the 1930s—the city also experienced a series of artistic and creative revolts that cemented its reputation as a cultural mecca. Jazz flowered here, so did folk music, so did the avant-garde of modern art, so did the Beats, so did punk and hip-hop.
Rent
A few years ago, an old family friend, whom I’ll call Anthony, went homeless at the age of sixty-eight and ended up sleeping in my dad’s Brooklyn basement, living on coffee and cigarettes. He had survived for years in a garret on the top floor of a brownstone on Strong Place, in the area once known as South Brooklyn, exchanging his labor for a roof and a toilet, his only foothold in a neighborhood where he’d worked for fifty years as an electrician and carpenter and plumber. But eventually the owner of the brownstone could see nothing more than cash in the pile of stone on Strong Place. A lot of landowners in South Brooklyn caught the greed bug during this time, when the real estate bubble began to inflate in 2002. The owner, who liked Anthony and told him he was sorry, sold to a speculator, left Brooklyn, and the brownstone was converted to condos.
Anthony, who never graduated high school, was a smart man, self-educated, and knew history. He knew that what was happening was part of a transformation of class, the wiping away of the class that wasn’t in hot pursuit of money. He was born in South Brooklyn on the eve of what he called the Great War. The Irish and the Italians fought in gangs on the waterfront, the mafia dumped bodies in the bay, and the merchant marines came and went in the boardinghouses and in the whorehouses. There were dockworkers, ironworkers, shipbuilders, grocers, laborers of all kinds, and, on occasion, there were weirdos who wrote books or painted on canvas for a living. Anyone could live here, because most anyone could afford it. I will not pretend that this is all the neighborhood amounted to; but it’s how Anthony remembered it, and for decades he had thrived, working where the work could be found, fixing whatever needed fixing. He had little interest in money, property, accumulation; his status, I gathered, was primarily tied to the quality of his workmanship. Then the ground fell out from labor in New York as industry fled at the dawn of globalization, and the stability of a life like Anthony’s was gone overnight—600,000 manufacturing jobs were lost from the city between 1968 and 1977. Over the next two decades, two-thirds of the city’s manufacturing jobs would disappear. The first wave of the gentrifiers arrived in the 1970s. They were my parents, who bought in South Brooklyn when property was still cheap.
“You have a single class now in the neighborhood, the mono-class of the rich,” Anthony told me one day. We were walking up and down Court Street, a stretch of shops and theaters and restaurants, looking for places and people he recognized. “No industry, no trades, no jobs for the average person to pull himself up. Now it’s all restaurants that the old-timers can’t afford. Now we got the Television Watchers, the Cell Phone Talkers. A whole class of men and women who watch TV or some version of it, like this internet thing. Sad. Free-thinking goes in the toilet. The Television Watchers start thinking alike, looking alike, buying alike, and they don’t know why.” After that conversation, I’d see him often on sunny days pacing Court Street, looking as lost as a child.
It’s a classic case study in gentrification: the old man gets pushed out by a land-value bubble as the new generation—white, affluent, professional—crowds in with gibberish about slow food and microbrews and Wi-Fi access. There have been real estate booms and busts throughout the history of New York—prices skyrocketing, enriching speculators, impoverishing renters, then impoverishing the speculators when prices crash—but this latest boom does not appear to be cyclical. It looks permanent, for it is driven by the permanency of the One Percenters, who can afford to bid up prices and keep them up while corralling an ever-larger portion of the city’s wealth. New York is thus increasingly ghettoized by class. Forty years ago, Daniel Friedenberg, a real estate developer who became disgusted at his line of business, predicted that the city would come to resemble “a grotesquely enlarged medieval town with each caste in its own quarter.” It has come to pass. As for Anthony, I do not know where he is today. He might be dead.
Sterility
And what of the city as engine of culture? The art critic Robert Hughes pronounced New York a fading star as early as 1990—just ten years into our new Gilded Age—“when the sheer inequality of New York became overpowering,” he wrote. “Could a city with such extremes of Sardanapalian wealth and Calcutta-like misery foster a sane culture?” Hughes declared it could not. Between 1980 and 1990, the One Percenters in New York roughly doubled their take of income, from 12 percent to 20 percent, and this conspicuous concentration of money inflated the art market, which was soon “run almost entirely by finance manipulators, fashion victims and rich ignoramuses.” The “impulses of art appreciation and collecting,” lamented Hughes, were now “nakedly harnessed to gratuitous, philistine social display.” At the same time, rents skyrocketed, driven by speculative real estate development. By the 1980s, wrote Hughes, “the supply of affordable workspace for artists in Manhattan finally ran out.” In a somber observation, Hughes noted, “It was always the work of living artists, made in the belief that their work could grow best there and nowhere else, that fueled New York. The critical mass of talent emits the energies that proclaim the center; its gravitational field keeps drawing more talent in, as in the combustion of a star, to sustain the reaction. The process is now dying.”
Thirty years on, with rents at historic highs, this has been a long death march, swallowing in its pall not only the artist, but the writer, the poet, the musician, the unaffiliated intellectual. The creative types sense that they are no longer wanted in New York, that money is what is wanted, and creative pursuits that fail to produce big money are not to be bothered with. But it is rent, more than anything else, that seals their fate. High rent lays low the creator, as there is no longer time to create. Working three jobs sixty hours a week at steadily declining wages, as a sizable number of Americans know, is a recipe for spiritual suicide. For the creative individual the challenge is existential: finding a psychological space where money—the need for it, the lack of it—won’t be heard howling hysterically day and night.
Crain’s New York Business, not known as a friend of the arts, reports the endgame of the trend identified by Hughes, namely that the young painter and sculptor are now sidestepping New York altogether, heading instead to cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and overseas to Berlin—wherever the rents are low and the air doesn’t stink of cash. The Times reports that freelance musicians in New York are killed off in a marketplace that no longer has need for them. The once-great Philharmonics, mainstay of a New York tradition, are crippled from lack of listeners, lack of funding; Broadway replaces the live musician in the well with the artifice of sounds sampled out of computers. New York loses its “standing as a creative center,” reports Crain’s. It becomes “sterile.” It is “an institutionalized sort of Disney Land” where “art is presented but not made.” Henceforth it will no longer be “known as a birthplace for new cultural ideas and trends.”
In Brooklyn, I bump into a newspaper editor I once worked with who tells me he is abandoning the city. He talks of Costa Rica, the dark side of the moon, even Los Angeles. Anywhere but New York. “It’s just too depressing to watch what’s happened,” he tells me. “The place is creatively bankrupt.” He had freelanced at the paltry rates that freelancers are expected to survive on—the wages dropping always lower, the marketplace for journalism devalued by “content mills” and “information aggregators” staffed by content serfs producing blog entries. Then he attempted to start a small newspaper in Brooklyn. The investors weren’t interested. “They want digital projects that promise an all-or-nothing billion dollars,” he tells me. “I just don’t get that buzzy creative vibe from New York anymore. I see mercenarianism. Cynical ambition. Monied dullness. People trying to get rich and cash out. It’s always a CEO and CTO and CFO launching a new web property. Not writers and editors getting together because they have common visions.”
This is old news. Technologic advances in the digital world order now mandate that the journalist vies in the editorial room with technocrats advising on the method for tweaking headlines and articles to the rhythm of Google. The model is from advertising: find what people want to hear, then echo it in the news so that they will be attracted to hear more of it. “If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money,” writes author Jaron Lanier. “If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless… Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.” No surprise then that the most lucrative “creative” jobs in New York for the “aggregating” of “content” are not in journalism but in corporate media, advertising, and marketing—the machines of manipulation and deceit.
Affluenza
“Everyone was broke and no one cared,” said a friend of mine recently, describing Brooklyn in the 1970s. The people he knew back then, before New York degenerated into a city run by and for the rich, “lived it up. They were freer and they were happier, because they weren’t so uptight about the money thing.” I think what my friend was saying was this: it was easier not to care about appearing to have money, easier on mind and spirit not to have to worry about the appurtenances of affluence.
His observation happens to be supported by a good deal of scholarship in the social sciences. Among developed nations, the evidence shows that healthier and happier societies—societies that are more sane, less uptight, whose members for the most part are enjoying life—are usually those with more equal distribution of wealth and income. The opposite correlation holds true: regardless of total wealth as measured by GDP, unequal societies appear to be less healthy and less happy—suffering, for instance, lower life expectancy, lower educational achievement, higher rates of obesity, more infant mortality and more mental illness and more substance abuse.
Richard Wilkinson, an emeritus professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham in England, offers a sweeping hypothesis to explain the causality in the correlations. Economic inequality, he and coauthor Kate Pickett write in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, “seems to heighten people’s social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. . . . If inequalities are bigger, so that some people seem to count for almost everything and others for practically nothing, where each one of us is placed becomes more important.” The result is “increased status competition and increased status anxiety,” whose effect on well-being is not to be underestimated. Scientists measuring stress-induced hormones in human beings have found that subjects were most stressed when faced with a task that included the opportunity for others to judge their performance—a “social-evaluative threat” to self-esteem and status, where the fear is that others might judge you negatively. A stressed person typically has higher cortisol, a steroid hormone that prepares body and mind to fend off danger and manage in an emergency. But if cortisol is high much of the time, it can act as a slow poison: the immune system is weakened, blood pressure rises, learning is impaired, bone strength is reduced, and, in some instances, the appetite is grossly stimulated. Wilkinson argues that, in a more unequal society, people become more stressed and insecure, vying in the hierarchy of status—more prone to feeling inadequate, defective, incompetent, foolish. And more sick both in body and mind.
The literature of the psychosocial effects of status competition and anxiety, to which Wilkinson’s work is only the latest addition, points to a broad-stroke portrait of the neurotic personality type that appears to be common in consumer capitalist societies marked by inequality. I see it all around me in New York, most acutely among young professionals. The type, in extremis, is that of the narcissist: Stressed, to be sure, because he seeks approval from others higher up in the hierarchy, though distrustful of others because he is competing with them for status, and resentful too because of his dependence on approval. He views society as unfair; he sees the great wealth paraded before him as an affront, proof of his failure, his inability, his lack. The spectacle of unfairness teaches him, among other lessons, the ways of the master-servant relationship, the rituals of dominance, a kind of feudal remnant: “The captain kicks the cabin boy and the cabin boy kicks the cat.” Mostly he is envious, and enraged that he is envious. This envy is endorsed and exploited, made purposeful by what appear to be the measures of civilization itself, in the mass conditioning methods of corporatist media: the marketeers and the advertisers chide and tease him; the messengers of high fashion arbitrate the meaning of his appearance. He is threatened at every remove in the status scrum. His psychological compensation, a derangement of sense and spirit, is affluenza: the seeking of money and possessions as markers of ascent up the competitive ladder; the worship of celebrities as heroes of affluence; the haunted desire for fame and recognition; the embrace of materialistic excess that, alas, has no future except in the assured destruction of Planet Earth and of every means of a sane survival.
Exhaustion
Look not to the youthful counterculture to challenge this madness. I am thinking here of the phenomenon of New York’s postmodern “hipster.” Forget that the term originated in the urban black subculture of the 1940s, primarily in New York, where the hipster maintained a style and language of nonconformity that was also implicitly a political statement, for the hipster stood apart from white authority (read: the cops) and was therefore menacing, subversive. Forget that the “white Negro” hipster of the 1950s, characterized in an essay of that name by Norman Mailer (a New Yorker) and represented in the ranks of the Angry Young Men and the Beatniks (also New Yorkers), stood by choice and necessity outside the mainstream, for yesteryear’s hipster wanted nothing to do with ’50s affluence, the cult of advertising, the postwar national security state, its standing armies and atom bombs.
The neohipster is a grotesque perversion of the original. If he fetishizes and hybridizes the cultural costumes of old hip—borrowing from the Beat poet, the jazzman, the rapper, the skater, the punk—it is only as a mockery of authentic anti-authoritarian countercultures. The neohipster is a creature of the advertisers: affluent and status-anxious, which means that he is consumerist and, in the manner of all conspicuous consumers, conforming to the demands of narcissistic chic. The “hipster zombies,” writes journalist Christian Lorentzen, are “more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts.” They are “the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real estate agents.” They are fauxhemians. And not much in the way of creative product has issued from their midst. The “hipster moment,” per New York Magazine, did not “produce artists.” It produced tattoo artists. “It did not produce photographers, but snapshot and party photographers… It did not produce painters, but graphic designers. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.”
Hipster culture today, writes author Jason Flores-Williams, “is harmless culture. And that’s an epic tragedy because being hip used to mean that you were heroic and dangerous. That you waged war on soullessness and greed through art and resistance. Being hip meant that you wanted upheaval in society. Being hip meant you were intense lower class, not detached upper class. Being hip meant being revolutionary.”
The cultural nihilism of the neohipster—it is nothing less—has its corollary in financial nihilism: they each arose at roughly the same moment, and they each have produced nothing of value. That the counterculture has no fist raised against the banker is obviously to the banker’s benefit. Every generation of youth since World War II has attempted to smash old customs and unjust systems—and terrified the elders. But not this one.
Politically, it is a disaster. The annals of popular resistance in America—in which turmoil and disruption have historically been the only means for achieving economic equality and social justice—teach us that without the energy of youth organized in the streets, there is little chance of progressive change. Culturally, what we are witnessing in the phenomenon of the neohipster is pattern exhaustion, which paleoanthropologists define as that moment in Stone Age societies when the patterns on pottery no longer advance. Instead, old patterns are recycled. With pattern exhaustion, there can be only repetition of the great creative leaps of the past. The culture loses its forward-looking vision and begins to die.
Cry Out!
It is August again, one year later, and my daughter is back in town. She brings with her a gift from Paris: a little book, barely a pamphlet, published in French under the title Indignez-Vous! which translates as “Cry Out!” or “Get Indignant!” or, perhaps more accurately, “Get Pissed Off!” It sold 600,000 copies in France when it was published last spring.
The author is a ninety-three-year-old French diplomat named Stéphane Hessel, who, during World War II, trained with the Free French Forces and British secret service in London, parachuted into Vichy France ahead of invading Allied troops in 1944, fought in the Resistance on his native soil, was captured by the Gestapo, and did time in two concentration camps. In “Cry Out!” Hessel reminds us that among the goals of the fight, as stated by the National Council of the Resistance following the defeat of Nazism, was the establishment in France of “a true economic and social democracy, which entails removing large-scale economic and financial feudalism from the management of the economy.” “This menace,” he writes—the menace of the fascist model of finance feudalism—“has not completely disappeared.” He warns that in fact “the power of money, which the Resistance fought so hard against, has never been as great and selfish and shameless as it is now.”
For the One Percenters are a global threat, found in every city where the technocratic managers of global capital seek to make money without being productive. They are in Moscow, London, Tokyo, Dubai, Shanghai. They threaten not merely the well-being of peoples but the very future of Earth. The system of short-term profit by which the One Percenters enrich themselves—a system that they have every interest in maintaining and expanding—implies everywhere and always the long-term plundering of the global commons that gives us sustenance, the poisoning of seas and air and soil, the derangement of ecosystems. A tide of effluent is the legacy of such a system. An immense planetwide inequality is its bequest, the ever-expanding gap between the few rich and the many poor.
Therefore, cry out—though the hour is late.
What is needed is a new paradigm of disrespect for the banker, the financier, the One Percenter, a new civic space in which he is openly reviled, in which spoiled eggs and rotten vegetables are tossed at his every turning. What is needed is a revival of the language of vigorous old progressivism, wherein the parasite class was denounced as such. What is needed is a new Resistance. We face, as Hessel describes, a system of social control “that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth,” that trumpets “contempt for the least powerful in society,” that offers only “outrageous competition of all against all.”
“To create is to resist,” writes Hessel. “To resist is to create.”
Such creativity, alas, is unlikely in New York. The city is regressing, and this sparks no protest from its people. Too many New Yorkers, it appears, want to join the One Percenters, want the all-or-nothing billion dollars. New York City, once looked upon as a crowning achievement of our civilization, one of its most progressive cities, is now the vanguard for the most corrosive tendencies in society. My daughter would probably do better to forget about this town.
Monday 22 August 2011
Post-Modernism is Dead! Long Live Ghost-Modernism!
A new exhibition signals the end of postmodernism. But what was it? And what comes next?
I have some good news—kick back, relax, enjoy the rest of the summer, stop worrying about where your life is and isn’t heading. What news? Well, on 24th September, we can officially and definitively declare that postmodernism is dead. Finished. History. A difficult period in human thought over and done with. How do I know this? Because that is the date when the Victoria and Albert Museum opens what it calls “the first comprehensive retrospective” in the world: “Postmodernism—Style and Subversion 1970-1990.”
Wait, I hear you cry. How do they know? And what was it? Postmodernism—I didn’t understand it. I never understood it. How can it be over?
You are not alone. If there’s one word that confuses, upsets, angers, beleaguers, exhausts and contaminates us all, then it is postmodernism. And yet, properly understood, postmodernism is playful, intelligent, funny and fascinating. From Grace Jones to Lady Gaga, from Andy Warhol to Gilbert and George, from Paul Auster to David Foster Wallace, its influence has been everywhere and continues. It has been the dominant idea of our age.
So what was it? Well, the best way to begin to understand postmodernism is with reference to what went before: modernism. Unlike, say, the Enlightenment or Romanticism, postmodernism (even as a word) summons up the movement it intends to overturn. In this way, postmodernism might be seen as the delayed germination of an older seed, planted by artists like Marcel Duchamp, during modernism’s high noon of the 1920s and 1930s. (Seen in this light, the start-date that the V&A offers for postmodernism—1970—is quite late.)
Thus, if modernists like Picasso and Cézanne focused on design, hierarchy, mastery, the one-off, then postmodernists, such as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, were concerned with collage, chance, anarchy, repetition. If modernists such as Virginia Woolf relished depth and metaphysics, then postmodernists such as Martin Amis favoured surface and irony. As for composers, modernists like Béla Bartók were hieratic and formalist, and postmodernists, like John Adams, were playful and interested in deconstructing. In other words, modernism preferred connoisseurship, tended to be European and dealt in universals. Postmodernism preferred commodity and America, and embraced as many circumstances as the world contained.
In the beginning, postmodernism was not merely ironical, merely gesture, some kind of clever sham, a hotchpotch for the sake of it. It became these things later in lesser works by lesser artists: Michael Nyman, Takashi Murakami, Tracey Emin and Jonathan Safran Foer. Rather, in the beginning artists, philosophers, linguists, writers and musicians were bound up in a movement of great force that sought to break with the past, and which did so with great energy. A new and radical permissiveness was the result. Postmodernism was a high-energy revolt, an attack, a strategy for destruction. It was a set of critical and rhetorical practices that sought to destabilise the modernist touchstones of identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty.
Above all, it was a way of thinking and making that sought to strip privilege from any one ethos and to deny the consensus of taste. Like all the big ideas, it was an artistic tendency that grew to take on social and political significance. As Ihab Hassan, the Egyptian-American philosopher, has said, there moved through this (our) period “a vast will to un-making, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the individual psyche, the entire realm of discourse in the west.”
Architecture is perhaps the easiest way to see some of these ideas in practice. In London, the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery (1991) is typical: the classical facets all stand in counterpoint to one another, offsetting and undermining and re-emphasising other more vernacular features like the gaping warehouse-door style entrances and the high non-windows; some of the columns are visible from one direction only; there’s redundancy; everything is over-determined and mannered; styles clash, mix, mingle.
The most contentious example of postmodern design, however, is the AT&T building in New York which was completed in 1984. The story of its reception is symbolic. In essence, the AT&T was considered a betrayal of everything positive and progressive that had been achieved since the war. It was a dissent from the implicit modernist notion that we would all march forward together into those bright and boxy skyscrapers glinting so functionally in the sun. What was this classical pediment with a circle shape cut out of the centre? What were the vast arched entryways and the pink granite detailing? The architect in question was the great Philip Johnson, the same Philip Johnson, it should be remembered, who was previously America’s most celebrated champion of modernism. Johnson died in 2005 but I met his artistic collaborator, Judith Grinberg, the woman who worked on the original drawings with him, and she recounted the impact of the building as we walked through its mighty halls.
“The terrible roar of objection centred on the top—the broken pediment,” she explained. “They hated it. There were people fighting each other in the pages of the press: aggressive, personal, vindictive, often nothing to do with architecture. Some people petitioned. Others denounced us. A lot of people attacked the authorities that had allowed construction… it went on and on.”
The AT&T building in New York (middle), completed in 1984
Grinberg remembers Johnson coming back from a trip to Italy with pictures of Florentine buildings and recalls the fundamental change in his thinking. “With all that reflection and refraction, modernism creates the illusion that there is an illusion when in fact it is a straightforward statement of money and power. But we wanted to get away from that. We wanted to say something else. There was a return to ornamentation—and there was a frivolity—something over and above the brutal structural form of the old modernist designs. You could say that the AT&T legitimised postmodernism to the whole world. The building became a lightning rod for what was happening, socially maybe, as well as architecturally.” This was a building that challenged the modernist premise of functional power by referencing other older, European styles, a building that collated and collapsed previous strictures, but was also something entirely new and radical and, in this, subversive. It was a provocation.
***
Thus apprised, we can now begin to identify postmodern artworks elsewhere in the period. The ceramics of Betty Woodman, are one example. In her work, the object and the image cohabit and references are made to both the history of colour and the history of ceramics. But no style or shape is privileged—or not for long. The Memphis-Milano movement (an Italian design and architecture group founded by Ettore Sottsass) also generated strongly postmodern work. One such example was the Casablanca sideboard from 1981, which is made out of plastic laminate so as to imply that design itself is theatrical, skin deep, kitsch.
But the attack against modernism was not merely negative. Perhaps the most positive and compelling example of postmodernism—postmodernism at its best if you will—is to be found in the world of dance; specifically, the truly amazing 1981 work, Drastic Classicism, choreographed by the great dancer Karole Armitage. The show begins when four electric guitarists and a drummer come on stage, and begin to crank out a voiceless punky cacophony which has no exact rhythm or melody. Oh Christ, we think. But then on come the dancers and suddenly the performance explodes—detonates—on the senses. Whatever dance was doing before, we realise, it won’t be doing it in quite the same way ever again. There is so much raw energy on stage: classical ballet combines with street dance, punk with folk, hip-hop with moments of ballroom, and then back again to ballet. There are leaps, grimaces, erotic posturing, ballons, brisés, bourrées. Sometimes the dancers dance alone, sometimes together. We begin to see classical ballet in the light of punk and punk in the light of hip-hop and hip-hop in the light of folk…
And thus, through powerful juxtaposition, the constituent parts of the performance, each of which is individually familiar, are renewed in front of our very eyes. We see them in fresh and startling ways. They garner new meanings and suggestions and resonances. That energy, that detonation, that de-favouring of one form over the other, that dissonant reassembly, the reappraisal that must follow, all of this taken together is pure and, yes, beautiful postmodernism.
The pop culture of the time deals in similar ideas. The classic example is David Byrne singing “you may ask yourself: how did I get here?” in the trailer for the Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense (1984), which then asks “why a film?” while he wears that famously huge suit (a statement about over-statement) and the images are interrupted by another question “Why the Big Suit?” and he begins to dance, but doesn’t really, until the next interruption “Why the odd movements?” and so on. Or again in, say, the 1988 video for Neneh Cherry’s song “Buffalo Stance,” which tells us that “no money man can win my love” while Cherry wears a gold dollar sign around her neck and the tune is stopped for her to say “know what I mean?” in an English accent.
The apogee of postmodernism pop, though, is of course Madonna. She is Marilyn Monroe at one moment, Marlene Dietrich the next; she is sadomasochist, virgin, material girl, wearer of the cross; she is the iconoclast feverishly invoking iconography, the eternal shape-shifter obsessed with her body, the image maker; she is brilliant; she endures; and yet she is a terrible actor, a clumsy and effortful dancer and an unexceptional singer. The over-styling, the celebrity-from-scratch, the referencing, the collation of images, the intensely self-conscious mediation with the audience, the whole stopping-making-sense-while-saying-something-about-sense-itself—that’s postmodernism.
So, let’s now turn with a little more confidence to the quagmire of sociology, politics and philosophy—Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault and so on. Postmodernism first appeared as a philosophical term in the book The Postmodern Condition (1979) by Jean-François Lyotard, the French thinker. Lyotard drew on Wittgenstein’s idea of the “language game,” which had pointed out that different groups of people use the same language in different ways, which in turn can lead to their looking at the world in quite separate ways. So, for instance, the priest might use a word, say “truth,” in a very different way to the scientist, who in turn would understand the term in quite a different way to the policeman, the journalist, the philosopher, or the artist. In this way, the notion of a single, overarching view of the world—a dominant narrative (or to use the jargon, meta-narrative)—vanishes. There is no single narrative, no privileged standpoint, no system or theory that overlays all others. Hence, Lyotard argued, all narratives exist together, side by side, with none dominating. This confluence of narratives is the essence of postmodernism. (Lyotard was an adherent of Marxism, one of the most potent meta-narratives of the modern age. But he turned his back on Marx. In this way, the origins of postmodern thought can be seen as, in part, a rejection of the totalitarian impulse—also, and not coincidentally, at its most powerful in the 1920s and 1930s.) Sadly, 75 per cent of the rest of the stuff written about postmodernism is nonsensical, incoherent, self-contradicting or otherwise emblematic of the crap that has consumed the academic world of linguistics and “continental” philosophy for too long. But not all.
There are two important points. First, that postmodernism is really an attack not just on the dominant narrative or art forms but rather an attack on the dominant social discourse. All art is philosophy and all philosophy is political. And the epistemic confrontation of postmodernism, this idea of de-privileging any one meaning, this idea that all discourses are equally valid, has therefore lead to some real-world gains for humankind. Because once you are in the business of challenging the dominant discourse, you are also in the business of giving hitherto marginalised and subordinate groups their voice. And from here it is possible to see how postmodernism has helped western society understand the politics of difference and so redress the miserable injustices which we have hitherto either ignored or taken for granted as in some way acceptable. You would have to be from the depressingly religious right or an otherwise peculiarly recondite and inhuman school of thought not to believe, for example, that the politics of gender, race and sexuality have been immeasurably affected for the better by the assertion of their separate discourses. The transformation from an endemically and casually sexist, racist and homophobic society to one that legislates for and promotes equality is a resonantly good thing. No question.
The second point is deeper still. Postmodernism aimed further than merely calling for a re-evaluation of power structures: it said that we are all in our very selves nothing more than the breathing aggregate of those structures. It contends that we cannot stand apart from the demands and identities that these structures and discourses confer upon us. Adios the Enlightenment. See you later Romanticism. Instead, it holds that we move through a series of co-ordinates on various maps—class, gender, religious, sexual, ethnic, situational—and that those co-ordinates are actually our only identity. We are entirely constructed. There is nothing else. And this, in an over-simplified nutshell, is the main challenge that postmodernism brought to the great banquet of human ideas because it changed the game from one of self-determination (Kant et al) to other-determination. I am constructed, therefore I am. But here we come at last to the trickiest question of all: how do we know postmodernism is over and why?
Let’s go back to the arts, the front line. It is not that postmodernism’s impact is diminished or disappearing. Not at all; we can’t unlearn a great idea. But rather, postmodernism is itself being replaced as the dominant discourse and is now taking its place on the artistic and intellectual palette alongside all the other great ideas and movements. In the same way as we are all a little Victorian at times, a little modernist, a little Romantic, so we are all, and will forever be, children of postmodernism. (This in itself is, of course, a postmodern idea.) All these movements subtly inform our imaginations and the way we discuss, create, react and interact. But, more and more, postmodernism is becoming “just” another one of the colours we might use. (Lady Gaga uses it, for example; but Adele does not.) Or, to switch metaphor, just another tool in the artist’s kit. Why? Because we are all becoming more comfortable with the idea of holding two irreconcilable ideas in our heads: that no system of meaning can have a monopoly on the truth, but that we still have to render the truth through our chosen system of meaning. So the postmodern challenge, while no less radical, somehow feels less powerful to us. We are learning to live with it.
Perhaps the best way to explain the reason for this development is to use my own art form: the novel. Postmodernism has informed literature for as long as I have been alive—Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Italo Calvino, Don DeLillo, Umberto Eco and so on through the alphabet. Indeed, the way I have written this article—self-consciously mixing both a formal and informal tone—is indebted to its ideas: the high style and the low style coexist for purposes of creating moments of surprise or unsettlement, or obscenity, or insight, in an effort to engage. But—and it’s a big but—the problem, which has been getting worse, is what we might call the postmodern paradox.
For a while, as communism began to collapse, the supremacy of western capitalism seemed best challenged by deploying the ironic tactics of postmodernism. Over time, though, a new difficulty was created: because postmodernism attacks everything, a mood of confusion and uncertainty began to grow and flourish until, in recent years, it became ubiquitous. A lack of confidence in the tenets, skills and aesthetics of literature permeated the culture and few felt secure or able or skilled enough or politically permitted to distinguish or recognise the schlock from the not. And so, sure enough, in the absence of any aesthetic criteria, it became more and more useful to assess the value of works according to the profits they yielded. Capital, as has been said many times before, accommodates all needs. So, paradoxically, we arrive at a moment where literature itself has become threatened, first by the artistic credo of postmodernism (the death of the author) and second by the unintended result of that credo, the hegemony of the marketplace. What then becomes sought and desired are fictions that resonate with the widest possible public: that is, with as many discourses as possible. This public can then give or withhold approval measured in sales.
In other words, increasingly, artistic success has become about nothing except money; and, increasingly, artists have come to judge their own success that way, too. This is the reason today that we feel the genre writer’s cry “I sold millions” so powerfully, even though in truth it can say little about the art form other than “it sold millions.” Changing disciplines, if we take this commoditisation of art to its natural limit, we arrive at Damien Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull, For the Love of God (2007). Commoditisation has here become the only point. The work, such as it is, centres on its cost and value and comprises also (I would say mainly) the media storm surrounding it: the rumours that it was bought for £50m, or that Hirst himself bought it, or that he offset his tax bill by claiming diamonds as tax deductible artistic materials, or that he didn’t buy it at all, or that nobody has bought it… And so postmodernly on. The paradox being this: that by removing all criteria, we are left with nothing but the market. The opposite of what postmodernism originally intended.
And, of course, there’s a parallel paradox in politics and philosophy. If we de-privilege all positions, we can assert no position, we cannot therefore participate in society or the collective and so, in effect, an aggressive postmodernism becomes, in the real world, indistinguishable from an odd species of inert conservatism.
Looked at in this way, it’s easier to see why its power has been diminishing. The postmodern solution will no longer do as a response to the world we now find ourselves in. As human beings, we avowedly do not wish to be left with only the market. Even billionaires want art collections. (Interestingly, that’s often one of the first things they want.) That conversation between artist and the public is therefore changing again, hastened by and in parallel with the dawn of the digital age.
Certainly, the internet is the most postmodern thing on the planet. The immediate consequence in the west seems to have been to breed a generation more interested in social networking than social revolution. But, if we look behind that, we find a secondary reverse effect—a universal yearning for some kind of offline authenticity. We desire to be redeemed from the grossness of our consumption, the sham of our attitudinising, the teeming insecurities on which social networking sites were founded and now feed. We want to become reacquainted with the spellbinding narrative of expertise. If the problem for the postmodernists was that the modernists had been telling them what to do, then the problem for the present generation is the opposite: nobody has been telling us what to do.
If we tune in carefully, we can detect this growing desire for authenticity all around us. We can see it in the specificity of the local food movement or the repeated use of the word “proper” on gastropub menus. We can hear it in the use of the word “legend” as applied to anyone who has actually achieved something in the real world. (The elevation of real life to myth!) We can recognise it in advertising campaigns such as for Jack Daniel’s, which ache to portray not rebellion but authenticity. We can identify it in the way brands are trying to hold on to, or take up, an interest in ethics, or in a particular ethos. A culture of care is advertised and celebrated and cherished. Values are important once more: the values that the artist puts into the making of an object as well as the values that the consumer takes out of the object. And all of these striven-for values are separate to the naked commercial value.
Go deeper still and we can see a growing reverence and appreciation for the man or woman who can make objects well. We note a new celebration of meticulousness, such as in the way Steven Wessel makes his extraordinary handmade flutes out of stainless steel. We uncover a new emphasis on design through making in the hand-crafted work of the Raw Edges Design Studios, say, with their Self-Made collection, objects that are original, informed by personal stories and limited edition. Gradually we hear more and more affirmation for those who can render expertly, the sculptor who can sculpt, the ceramist, the jeweller, even the novelist who can actually write. Jonathan Franzen is the great example here: a novelist universally (and somewhat desperately) lauded, raised almost to the status of a universal redeemer, because he eschews the evasions of genre or historical fiction or postmodern narratorial strategies and instead tries to say something complex and intelligent and telling and authentic and well-written about his own time. It’s not just the story, after all, but how the story is told.
These three ideas, of specificity, of values and of authenticity, are at odds with postmodernism. We are entering a new age. Let’s call it the Age of Authenticism and see how we get on.
“Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990,” will be at the V&A Museum from 24 Sept 2011 to 15 Jan 2012. The exhibition is supported by the Friends of the V&A with further support from Barclays Wealth
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
